Join the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) for a talk by Lexie Cook (assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Northwesten) as part of our Works in Progress series.
Coffee and light refreshments will be served.
About the talk: When Portuguese merchants, military men, and missionaries first established a presence along the coasts and islands of Atlantic Africa in the 15th century, they brought with them two words that would shape Afro-Atlantic ritual idioms for centuries to come. The trajectory of the first and more notorious of the two, feitiço, a charm or operation of sorcery, is well charted – first in the dozens of inquisition cases that criminalized African sacred forms and later in the colonial lexicon as “fetish,” a master-signifier for African religiosity. In the second word, relíquia or relic, African-born and Afro-descended people on the continent and across the Atlantic found a generative metaphor, a term of correlation, and a counterproposal to the fetish-accusation. This paper will trace a West African itinerary of analogizing between “fetishes” and “relics” over the course of the seventeenth century, beginning with the definitional disputes that characterized Jesuit-Marabout relations in the trading enclaves of coastal Senegambia and ending with those that unfolded between African-born “mandingueiros” and Portuguese Inquisitors. I will sketch out some proposals for situating these Afro-Atlantic relics within the contested development of the problem of the fetish, specifically with regards to negotiations over value and truth, in the marketplace and before the law.
Lexie Cook is assistant professor of Spanish & Portuguese at Northwestern University. She is a specialist in the written, material, and performative cultures that traversed Iberian and West African historical worlds during the early modern period. Trained as a literary scholar and art historian, her work brings the attention to form and meaning cultivated in these fields to bear on larger historical questions around empire, race, political economy, and the law, with special regard for how these are experienced and negotiated by people of ordinary condition. Her current book in progress - Before the Fetish - tells the story of how a medieval Portuguese concept of artificial magic came to define as "fetishes" a corpus of African forms accused of blurring the boundaries between sacred and commercial spheres.
Her second project – The Mandinga Experience: Performance and Proof in the Early Black Atlantic – reconstructs and interprets the theatrical repertoires, meanings of experience, and notions of proof put forward by a set of African illusionists from across the Portuguese Atlantic, known collectively as the mandingueiros, as they faced the Inquisition.
She also writes about the poetics of imposture and swindling, the linguistic politics of the slave trade, island-books, buried treasure, and picaresque literature. She has held visiting researcher positions at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal. Before coming to Northwestern, she taught in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University in the UK.
Rebecca Shereikis
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