Decolonial Baroque: Baroque Aspects of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

This dissertation explores three instances where Inca Garcilaso de la Vega advances a Baroque form of writing. These Baroque instances function as powerful tools for a decolonial approach to Hispanic modernity. Different from other approximations to the Hispanic Baroque, where Spanish American authors are subsidiaries or the European Baroque, I argue that Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is a pioneer of the Hispanic Baroque. Moreover, I argue that this Spanish American Baroque not only has characteristics of its own, but that it also influenced Baroque European works. I claim that Garcilaso uses three Baroque rhetorical strategies to develop a decolonial approach to Renaissance thought, especially to the question of coloniality. The objective of this dissertation is thus to rethink the epistemological impositions of coloniality on Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s work as well as on modern Hispanic letters as. More broadly, this study aims at rethinking the conceptual categories of writing with which we have traditionally understood early modern Hispanic literature