Lexie Cook 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 book-in-progress – Before the Fetish – retells 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. Alongside this, it reconstructs the untold story of how West African interlocutors, observing the missionaries’ dual commitment to conversion and slaving, found in the Catholic “relic” a more adequate translation for their sacred forms, implicitly returning the accusation. Against a backdrop of intensifying commerce and slaving in the coastal enclaves of early modern West Africa, the book shows how “the problem of the fetish” posed, from the beginning, the problem of the morality of exchange, long before it was refashioned into a symbol of the spiritual deformities inflicted by capitalism.
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.
