Lexie Cook

Lexie Cook is currently a Research Fellow at the Getty Institute and finishing her PhD in LAIC and with the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. She is a specialist in the written and visual culture of the Iberian Atlantic. For the most part, her research is situated at the intersections of West African and Iberian language-worlds and aesthetic traditions. She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and an M.A. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures, both from Columbia. Her dissertation project, “Before the Fetish: Artifice and Trade in early modern Guinea” traces the materialization of the problem of the fetish in the archives of Portuguese, Spanish and Creole-speaking West Africa. The project gives an account of the Africanization of an Iberian concept of vernacular magic (hechicería in Spanish and feitiçaria in Portuguese) in the context of the Portuguese commercial and evangelical projects in Guinea and the larger peri-Atlantic trade in captives. It is the first to assemble and theorize of a corpus of the original forms described in Iberian and Cabo Verdean sources as hechizos and feitiços––precursors to what later came to be known in ethnological vocabularies as African fetish-objects.

The central premise of her dissertation is that the early modern installation of the fetish as a master-concept for West African sacred forms was driven by (1) the need for a regulatory concept that could match the incredible plasticity of the sacred in West African religious culture and (2) a growing suspicion in these coastal trading zones that consecration had become a form of commodification and that commodification, by extension, had a ritual efficacy of its own.

She also works on translation, cartography, linguistic geographies of the slave trade and the cultural politics of decolonization in Lusophone Africa.