This special issue gathers scholars from Religious Studies, Anthropology, Art History, and the study of the Americas to reconsider the academic categories we use to connect the cultures we study. In individually authored mini essays and more sprawling group conversations, contributors examine four key categories: “Material,” “Economies,” “Religion,” and “America(s).” Readers of this issue will find the data described in these pages to be wide-ranging—chronologically, traditionally, geographically, and otherwise. But we are not only interested in variety. We also ask after data’s organization, quantification, and regulation. Taken together, this special issue asks how to characterize these categories. The ambition is that our collective inquiries into such varied interpretive histories and genealogical fragments can offer ways to better understand their assorted conveyances, as well as the powerful grip of their critical conjunction.  

The particular case studies, object narratives, and casting calls that individual participants chose to enter into this endeavor include First Nations commemorative medals and biblical translations, spirit-guided Swedish temple designs, the global industry of Kim Kardashian, and Cuban musicians and Moroccan artists in New York. And that’s just a few of the provocative projects featured in these pages. There’s much more: from grapefruit-scented candles in SoulCycle Studios to autopsy photographs rendered in poem and prose; Sondheim musical at Carnegie Hall and the monetized infrastructure of biblical womanhood blogs. Readers of this special issue will glimpse Fijian tabua and scrimshaw collections on Long Island, bus station clocks in Montreal, felled California redwoods, and documents of extractive industry in Canada, Burma, and Brazil. So too you’ll find discussion of seventeenth-century documents and woodcut images exchanged among confraternity members in Lima, waterproof socks engineered for the twenty-first-century American Muslim market, a mid-twentieth-century professional wrestler cast as Mormon, and a Catholic icon commissioned in 2016 for the Archdiocese of Denver.

Akin to the simultaneously succinct and varied things included in this special issue, the life of this project has also been both meandering and socially abbreviated. It began in 2017 through our participation as fellows in “Material Economies of Religion in the Americas: Arts, Objects, Spaces, Mediations,” a project cycle of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) at Yale University and funded in part by The Henry Luce Foundation. The thematic and theoretical concerns of the MAVCOR project cycle structured the terms and conditions out of which this special issue grew. The contributions gathered in this issue draw readily and advisedly upon key themes of the MAVCOR grant project, as it has been directed by Sally Promey and Sarah Rivett. After meeting for two annual conferences as part of the project cycle, we invited other fellows to participate in an experimental roundtable at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR). Eager to continue the work begun at the AAR, we then met for continued collaboration in a Zoom salon during the pandemic summer of 2020. In an effort to formalize and expand those conversations into new publics, our thinking has since morphed into the twenty-one individual essays and six collaborative conversations that are included here. 

We initially asked each contributor to submit a single image file, gif, or short video and an accompanying text, limited to 2200 characters. The provocation was to experiment with processes of thinking—individually and collaboratively, in small cohorts and amid tight parameters, as well as part of more open-ended conversations. We sought to play seriously with emerging practices of how writing is reckoned. Ever since Twitter and Instagram started determining discourse in character counts, less likely platforms have followed. For instance, in 2020 the American Academy of Religion instructed that proposals for its annual meeting be 7,500 characters including spaces. Is this new metric simply an alternate calculation to adjust to? Or does something more substantial happen as we move from page counts to word counts to character counts? What is lost? What is urged forward or recovered, even in brief? 

As curators of this project, we emphasize character(s) and characterizing as a way to reapproach these questions and connect them with a critique of our present, especially in so far as “character” is an increasingly demanding measure of work and social life. To our minds, the interpretive openness of these terms prompts thinking not only about social media-driven modes of public discourse but also about archival nomination, definitional approach, descriptive technique, discursive valuation, and the apportioning measures of feedback loops. If “characterizing” could be understood as asking after essential features, it could likewise provide a space for pointed criticism of substantive or phenomenological approaches to any one of the terms conjoined here (“material,” “economy,” “religion,” “Americas”). Hillary Kaell’s study of bus station clocks occasions her proposal of “material economies” as “systems of managed resources,” which assemble component parts and human labor as well as feelings of utopian interconnectedness and the fleeting intensities of globalism in everyday spaces and times. Richard Callahan’s correspondence with Judith Brunton and Alex Kaloyanides about their respective studies of whales, oil, and teak similarly addresses practices of managing resources. Callahan proposes that we should consider the agency of “basic, fundamental ‘natural resources’ out of which the ‘human’ world is built” and how the “work of transforming them sets up basic relations to matter and the possibilities and limits of what it means to exist.” For Laura Levitt, David Walker, and Sally Promey, “the key economic actor and material is the human body, in literal and figurative manifestations.” This special issue, then, does not propose new definitions for each of our four key terms. It offers a framework for their equivocal reconsideration and conjunctive interrogation.

The experiment we set out in our initial call among MAVCOR project fellows revealed the appeal of short writing assignments, especially in the midst of an emerging pandemic. We were happily surprised that so many fellows from the project cycle accepted our invitation. We were less surprised when many of us found that 2200 characters were too few. Each individual mini essay published in this issue includes a calculation of its character count (including spaces). Careful readers will notice that not all scholars adhered to the character conventions we sought to establish at the outset. We are glad for these scholar’s protests—however subtle, however intentional—and find in their variously reckoned rebellions not accruals to be corrected but rather material for continued thought. They ask how counting characters shapes the practices of precision. Conversations and email exchanges with contributors again attested to participants’ diverging responses. Some found the strict parameters creatively appealing (“Love it. Everything should be short,” one participant wrote. “One of the biggest things is I am left wanting more, whereas a longer paper is tiring.”). For others, it was an interpretive battle (“the character count seems to be at war with trying to offer qualitative assessments of material economies,” another contributor countered). What for some was a freeing permission to share a bit of new research turned for others into a futile constriction. Throughout the process we wondered if we were: watering down or distilling? offering propositions for further thought and deeper discussion? amplifying the seemingly endless echo chambers and hot takes of an online economy ever aiming after virality? To our mind, the answer is: yes, somehow, to all of this. Perhaps, reader, you are less ambivalent and more ready to align your response with one or another of these conclusions. We welcome this and invite your own replies, rejections, and rebellions.

In Zoom rooms and in the margins of shared Google Docs, we asked participants to couple their individualized practices of paring down with exercises in collective elaboration. Once each contributor shared a media nomination and mini essay, we all gathered in an online salon to discuss them as a whole before breaking off yet again—this time into small cohorts to correspond in greater depth about one another’s work as well as to address the project’s central question about how to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas. Using the newly proliferating pandemic vocabulary of “synchronous” and “asynchronous,” groups then arranged further meetings over email or Zoom. 

This special issue is not just a multi-disciplinary consideration of American religions. It is also a call for expansive conversations about what counts, and how and why we count. In crafting something meaningful within and against the relatively novel metric of character counts, contributors have thought creatively about refinement and sacrifice, accumulation and concentration, gathering and extracting, congregating and keening. What does it mean to adhere to these limiting parameters? How and why might one reform, resist, or rebel against these (seemingly micro) demands? How much space do we need to follow an idea or an analysis through? What genres—of writing and conversation, scholarship and public discourse–do we need to characterize material economies of religion in the Americas, including our own labors amid them? We hope this special issue challenges readers of MAVCOR Journal to ask such questions and experiment with related approaches in their own work—in the archives and the field, in classroom pedagogy and public conversation, online and off—and to continue to reflect upon the rituals of labor that underwrite the study of religion, its character(s), and the mechanics of its characterization.

Thumbnail image: Sculpture at Frederik Meijer Gardens, Grand Rapids, MI. Photograph © wsilver via Flickr. CC BY 2.0

This Essay is in complement to Cécile Fromont’s Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022). Clicking on the figures in this article will bring readers to galleries containing further images from the works in which they feature. 

In my book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Central Africa, I study for the first time the visual project that Capuchin Franciscan friars devised and implemented in and about central Africa between 1650 and 1750.1 As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola, the friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides."2  The visual or textual compendia were meant to teach the missionaries that would follow in the veterans’ footsteps about the specificities of central Africa, from its natural environment to its political landscape, to the range of its religious practices from Roman Catholicism to what the friars perceived as heathenry and idolatry.

In Images on a Mission, I discuss how the Capuchin didactic images form a unique and exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800. I also demonstrate that the corpus transforms our understanding of early modern global interactions in several ways. First, it brings to the fore the Capuchin missionary project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has remained largely unstudied, although it was every bit as broad and ambitious as the contemporaneous, robustly investigated Jesuit and Franciscan apostolic ventures. Further, it highlights a set of spiritual and epistemological interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context. The Capuchins worked in the already Christian kingdom of Kongo as well as in many, for the most part independent, polities such as Matamba, Ndongo, or the Ndembo area in Angola, a toponym the Portuguese coined in the sixteenth century from a local royal title that referred to a region extending over the northern two-thirds of the modern namesake country (Fig. 1).3

Far from acting as the religious arm of a colonial project, except in the thin enclave of Portuguese Angola, the friars operated in this geography at the demand, and under the supervision of local powers. They had to adhere to the pre-existing organization, rituals, and tenets of the more than century-old church of the Kongo, and worked in both Kongo and Angola alongside central African scholars and specialists who were essential, and in some cases principal, actors leading the knowledge-making and knowledge-gathering enterprise at the core of the corpus they assembled.

The Capuchin central African vignettes are thus expressions of a discourse about nature, culture, and faith that friars and the people of Kongo and Angola co-constructed in the course of their interactions. They are, in this view, not European conceived and executed pictures of the region and its inhabitants, but pictures from central Africa, molded in the dialogue that unfolded between the friars and central Africans. In analyzing the unique, fraught yet collaborative relationship between friars and central Africans from which the Capuchin images and texts emerged, Images on a Mission probes the mechanics of cross-cultural religious change and knowledge-creation in the early modern period. It analyses the nature, process, and limits of Catholic conversion and the fluid contours of orthodoxy drawn in the confrontations and negotiations unfolding among a heterogeneous cast of European and African priests, local church leaders, devout Christians, apostates, heathens, and cynics. It also enriches our grasp of the cross-cultural dimension of early modern (visual) natural history in offering examples of knowledge honed in the meeting and integration of classical, biblical, and other European written and oral sources with African ideas and modes of experimentation. The page of the Parma Watercolors holding the fantastical manatee pictured as a woman-fish after its Portuguese name and fame of peixe-mulher also recorded, for instance, the anti-hemorrhagic use of the animal’s ribs that friars learned from central African “surgeons” (Fig. 2). 

A primary goal of Images on a Mission is to reveal and emphasize the cross-cultural dimension of images such as the Capuchins’ that, though concerned with the extra-European world, are of European form, created for European viewers, and, at least nominally, by European image-makers. To do so, it takes an approach that considers the circumstances of the images’ creation, i.e. the cross-cultural encounters, broadly defined, from which they emerged, as their actual author. This method sheds long overdue light on visual productions such as the Capuchin central African images whose cross-cultural dimension has otherwise remained all but invisible to their original viewers as well as to later scholars. In the Capuchin corpus, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century image-makers did not name or mention the local scholars and interlocutors who shaped the content of their compositions, in effect silencing their contributions. In turn, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have been poorly equipped to recognize and acknowledge cross-cultural interventions in visual documents when their traces are not visible at the level of form or documented in the biography of their maker, or when it has been naturalized to the point of becoming invisible.4 Considering the circumstances of the images’ creation as holding authorial agency allows to lift this double veil. It points to the cross-cultural dialogues that underlay their making and it invites analyses that see them no longer as wholly European images of central Africa, but as images from central Africa and molded by central Africans in dialogue with Europeans.   

Most of the watercolors and ink drawings that emerged from the Capuchin central African missions have confounded interpretation and remained unpublished in their own times as well as in ours. Images on a Mission analyzes the reasons these images have been so baffling and the consequences of the challenges they posed to viewers, censors, and editors in the seventeenth century as well as to scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Essay, however, focuses on the limited number of prints linked to the Capuchin central African images that did see the printing press, principally as part of Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola. Published in Bologna in 1687 after a long and complex publication process, this book remains the most important source for central African history to this day.5  This Essay also addresses related imagery published shortly after in another publication, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale (Napoli, 1692).6

Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, a native of the region of Modena, served as a missionary in central Africa, principally in the lands of queen Njinga, between 1654 and 1667. He had just returned to Italy after a long journey through Brazil when, in 1669, the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide, the papal institution for the propagation of the faith, commissioned from him a history of the Capuchin mission to central Africa. His long experience in the region and his reputation as a prolific writer and image-maker made him a good candidate for the task. He immediately set to work. In addition to the documents he had brought back with him from Angola, he consulted the Roman archives, the meager published material on the region, and the writings of his fellow friars.7 He soon produced a manuscript that, in 1671, failed to obtain the Propaganda Fide’s approval for its publication due to the cost of printing such a lengthy book. When Cavazzi set off for his second stay in central Africa in 1673, he left his book in the hands of his brother in religion, Bonaventura da Montecuccolo, who was to pursue printing in Bologna with an alternate source of funding. The project moved forward until the text and images that Cavazzi had commissioned from friar Paolo da Lorena met the opposition of the censors because of the miracles they described. The manuscript was eventually entrusted to Fortunato Alamandini da Bologna, a Capuchin who never travelled to central Africa, for editing in 1678. After years of revision and further review the book was approved for publication in 1684 and finally published in 1687.8

The final version of the book includes fifty-one copper plate engravings and etchings. Most of the prints are the creation of Paolo da Lorena from Cavazzi’s commission of the early 1670s, including the frontispiece signed “F. Paul.s a Lothar.a Cap. Sculp” (Fig. 3). Fortunato Alamandini conceived and proudly signed eight others “F. Fort°. f.f.” as corrective to what he deemed the “weak” images of friar Paolo, which he had hoped to replace altogether, but was not able to do so for lack of funds (see for example Fig. 4).9

Most of the images in Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, whether designed by Paolo da Lorena and Cavazzi, or recreated by Alamandini, have deep roots in the corpus of didactic Capuchin manuscripts, whose format and style many of them share. Only fifteen derive entirely or in part from paintings that Cavazzi composed in the 1660s for an earlier work which was not one of the practical guides, the Missione Evangelica also known as the Araldi Manuscript, covering similar topics as the Istorica descrizione (compare for instance Fig. 5 & Fig. 6).10

Thirty-three, however, are especially close to one of the didactic manuscripts, the Parma Watercolors created circa 1663-1690.11  The relationship between the two is not directly that of original and copy, but rather one of belonging to a common visual milieu, likely through the existence of a third, common source, until now unidentified and likely no longer extant. The prints and watercolors present to their viewers almost identical scenes, such as that of a funeral ceremony (Figs. 7 & 8) or a manatee, the latter also featuring in Merolla’s Breve . . . relatione, discussed below (Figs. 2, 9-11).12

The image network in which Cavazzi’s Istorica Descrizione participated also included visual material outside of the Capuchin orbit. Seven of the designs are connected to Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta’s earlier and very successful volume on central Africa, the 1591 Relatione del reame del Congo et delle circonvicine contrade. The Relatione was an edition by Italian cosmographer Pigafetta of the eyewitness testimony about central Africa of Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese merchant whom the king of Kongo made his ambassador to the papacy in the late sixteenth century (Figs. 12 & 13).13  The richly illustrated volume received much attention from contemporary viewers and was translated by the de Bry family of publishers and engravers into Latin and German later in the decade, with additional prints.14  Copies of the de Bry volumes were in Luanda at the time Cavazzi worked on his manuscripts.15

The relation of Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s travels to central Africa published in Naples in 1692 belongs to the same visual milieu that produced the prints in the Istorica descrizione. Its nineteen copper plates parallel and complement the prints and paintings in the Istorica descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. The volume, titled Breve, e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo retells Merolla’s activities and experiences in Kongo and Angola between 1683 and 1688 as collected and written down by Angelo Piccardo da Napoli from oral interviews with the missionary after his return to Naples in 1689.16 No information about the commission and production of the copper plates included in the rapidly published volume has emerged so far. It is clear, however, that they share strong kinship with both the Istorica Descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. Merolla’s plates would have been created shortly after the publication of the former and the composition of the latter. The text, moreover, makes many direct or indirect references to the Istorica Descrizione, the publication of which received much attention. In 1690, a second edition of the Istorica descrizione, first published in Bologna in 1687, appeared in Milan, with copper plates copied closely from the first edition. This later, more modest version presented the vignettes bound between pages of text on short strips of paper. The rectangular illustrations were etched several to one large sheet of paper, and then cut into individual images.17  This was the first of many reeditions in several languages.18

As outlined in table 2, some of the prints in Merolla have precedents in both the Cavazzi prints and the Parma Watercolors. Others have links to only one or the other of the works. Consider for example the scene of justice under the tree in Merolla’s plate 12 (Fig. 14) alongside the Istorica descrizione’s plate 24 (Fig. 15) , or the Parma Watercolors 27 (Fig. 16) While the three scenes of justice closely mirror one another, the tapping of palm wine in  number 17 in the sequence (Fig. 17), is echoed, distantly, in the Parma Watercolors 44 (Fig. 18) but does not feature in the Istorica descrizione. 

Others still have parallels in neither. Some have sources outside of the Capuchin central African realm, such as the banana tree in plate 3 (Fig. 19), which is close to the one in Lopes and Pigafetta(Fig. 20). Most of the vignettes without direct comparanda, however, follow templates that would easily fit within the missing pages of the Parma Watercolors, which, in their current state of conservation include 67 folios labelled from numbers 2 to 104, with lacunae. For example, the depiction of blacksmithing at the top of print 16 (Fig. 21) would have found its place alongside the Parma Watercolors depicting work and craft such as agriculture, folio 76r, cooking, folio 77r, or weaving, folio 79r. The compound at the top of print 14 (Fig. 22) would fit alongside the series on architecture starting with folios 23r and 24r, but missing two folios, numbers 25 and 26. The aristocratic man and woman at the bottom of the same print in Merolla, in turn, would insert itself well as the missing folio 69r preceding a similar representation of dress in folio 70r.

Notably, none of the prints in Merolla are linked to the Araldi manuscript or to vignettes in the Istorica descrizione inspired by it. This is a telling detail that suggests that Merolla or his editor Piccardo did not rely only or even principally on Cavazzi’s published tome in the creation of the prints. Rather, Merolla’s illustration program points to its origins in another set of visual models, linked to the Parma Watercolors. It thus stands as a significant piece in the visual jigsaw puzzle of the Capuchin visual production linked to their missions in Kongo and Angola.

The two tables below describe the interconnections between Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, Merolla’s Relatione, and other visual sources in the Capuchin visual corpus and beyond. Visual comparisons can be accessed by clicking on the image number. The images presented in this Essay are the best available at the time of publication, though not always completely satisfactory. The binding for Merolla’s Relatione is particularly tight in most extant copies, which makes scans or photographs of its illustrations challenging to produce. This issue has been compounded by the ongoing limitations on new imaging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Essay assembled nonetheless serves its purpose of assembling, presenting, organizing, and inviting further attention to this important and understudied corpus of images.

In August 2020, Zoom was still something of a strange place. Like the gender performances we summoned as we spoke—the wife and the wifey, the artist and the influencer—Zoom evokes intimacy as well as expanse. Our contributions took us from the familiarity of scent to the spread of colonial space/time, pulling us into Black vernacular culture and “linking” us to divine power through the digital. As we saw our heads appearing side by side, Toronto (Suzanne van Geuns), New Haven (Dustin Gavin), and Hamilton (Ellen Amster) suddenly close enough to touch, we were struck by the ironies that stack up in the gender performances we discussed. Continually drawing in and refusing their audiences, they never quite stay fixed in the frame.

Gender performances as openings or windows—into colonial space/time, into Black vernacular culture, into divine power

Intimacy—of the body, its smells and familiarities, of affiliation and connection as gendered performances

Space—as calling on religious histories, gendered embodiment as enmeshment with space, as existing online in dynamics of perusing/browsing, as circulation in or out of control

Irony—gender performance and irony as something they become possible by taking on the perspective of the watching audience, humor as happening through being a gender and not being it, performances that are always removed from their audience, performances that are always already refusing any other perspective

Suus: [00:00:07] All right, go. We can start shining!

Ellen: [00:00:13] I can start. 

Suus: [00:00:15] Sure. 

Dustin: [00:00:16] Sure.

Ellen: [00:00:17] So my slide is about Lalla Essaydi, who is a Moroccan visual artist. Her name means Madam Sir, and she says explicitly in her artist’s statement that she draws on male languages of Orientalist painting and Islamic calligraphy in order to create women-centered art. I didn’t emphasize that in the slide because there wasn’t enough space. For religious studies, I focus on another aspect of her work, which is the ways in which she creates place. She calls her body a converging territory between east and west and between past and present. In her images, like the ones I showed you, the woman becomes part of the house: her clothing looks like the fabrics or the tile work in the house, so that she literally becomes part of the place. This is a realization of an Islamic concept, also demonstrated in Sufi shrines, in which a person becomes an opening to God in the world when they are buried. 

In terms of the ways in which I see our pieces fitting together, I see the common theme that the material of religion is about the body, representation of the body, the body and space. Suus has Bible hair accessories, Dustin has Wifey—a physical fragrance. Dustin also has a picture of Kim Kardashian’s body. And there’s an allusion to food with this little candy that she’s sitting on. In all these ways, the body or the processes of the body are being referred to through the rendering of the female body. The author is trying to define womanhood and women’s identity, getting to Suus’s point, but the author or artist is also translating a religious concept to the contemporary world through the body—making the abstract concrete. 

The themes I saw were biblical womanhood and the wifey: both a wife as a good wife and then also this different and somewhat historical concept of the wifey. And then the third theme is this idea of Sufi Islamic sacred. What is the sacred space? That’s it for me.

Suus: [00:03:12] That’s great, thank you. I’ll jump in here, because I see an interesting connection to what you wrote in your piece about the dead bodies of holy people as openings to God. The women I study will often say that their goal is for the blog to be less of them and more of Jesus, emphasizing that they are making themselves into a channel for divine power. When they pass on that divine power to other people, that’s a really good thing—the more they can make themselves into that kind of opening, the better. I think we can think about this in general terms. What sort of power comes from being a transmitter or a “link” to something else? A media question that is interesting in relation to Kim Kardashian, too. Is the wifey someone who gains power, or even just proximity to power, by being its window or its channel? 

Ellen: [00:04:43] Did you want to say a bit more about your piece?

Suus: [00:04:47] Oh, yeah, sure. I’m really interested in this idea of stickiness and affiliation, and the Internet as a place where that can be monetized and rewarded. These women fuse together and affiliate these different systems of circulation. One is the Internet economy, which works by installing cookies on a particular user and then those cookies will kind of survey the user as they browse online, bringing in money by following their movements. But there’s also religious circulation happening, with these women working to model and pass around something other than themselves. Their blog posts always repeat: “I find it actually very hard to smile at my husband, I need divine grace and intervention to be able to summon or model Christ for my husband in how I smile at him.” 

My interest is in how the coded layer of cookies fuses with the theological layer of saying this is how women should be. People often think that influencers are selling themselves. For the women I study, it’s very clear that they’re actually not selling the self so much as they’re selling their ability to be a link, their ability to affiliate. And I think that is a relevant distinction in religious economies, too. 

Dustin: [00:06:58] The one word that I think runs through all of our topics is intimacy. I’m thinking of what to do with how intimacy is gendered, and what religion may have to do with this gendered nature of being intimate. The choice to do Kim and the fragrance comes from how I think personally about fragrances and how important fragrances are to me. That is mostly about some intimacy with my own body, but also the bodies that I come in contact with. What does it mean to be an intimate body and to engage with other bodies? 

With Kim Kardashian in particular, what does it mean when all your engagement is your body? This is the example of smell, but what does it mean when you’re a body in constant engagement, the body as the pieces of your life? What does it mean to move through life and being this idea of a fleshy sort of body? I was also thinking about space and how we craft and mesh with spaces, how we become different spaces, how we become a space in between our different projects. In my mind, that flows through all of the projects, this idea of engaging with and becoming or being one with a space, and what that has to do with holiness and sacredness. What is sacred when you’re claiming a space?

Suus: [00:09:19] Yeah, that is really interesting. I am thinking now of the way these blogs are always saying “welcome and settle down with a cup of tea, come sit on my porch.” The blog is ostensibly a diary, a story of the self. Yet it also becomes a place where we go as we’re “surfing.” That is very thought-provoking for me—while blogs feel less physical, we do actually move from place to place online, and they are bounded sites in a network. 

Ellen: [00:09:55] Dustin, can you talk a little bit about your project? Why did you choose that particular image and that particular thing?

Dustin: [00:10:15] I picked the thing and the image as a nod to different ideas of nostalgia and memory. The heart candy—I’m also thinking about production and consumption and capitalism, and the heart candy taps into nostalgia. I have also been thinking a lot about intimacy and smell. A lot of my work is in reality TV. I deal with the Housewives franchise, and I’m always asking: What does it mean in the contemporary world to be a housewife? What is that role? How is that defined? 

The contrast between the housewife as an idea from Protestant Christianity and her claim to the role of wifey, in relation to how I came to understand the term “wifey,” is really interesting to me. I think she does embody that role, this idea and aesthetic of the ride-or-die chick. I wanted to play with the fact that this demarcation of the wifey is very much still wife, but remixed. It’s the colors of a wife, maybe with a different sort of texture. I wanted to play with whatever that texture is—what is it? What happens when we add that “y” at the end? Why does it change when the form is still the same? A lot of what Kim Kardashian does—she is a cultural reset sort of person, someone who does things that make you question the nature of terms. I wanted to question the term that she claimed, wifey, from a completely different sort of realm and world.

Suus: [00:13:02] The super white conservative Christian bloggers in my research would be upset at the “y” being necessary.

Dustin: [00:13:30] I think it’s also interesting to me precisely because the wifey is not a wife. Wifey is an attitude, it’s an idea. Your girlfriend can be wifey. I wanted to play with that a bit. She’s not exactly a wife, necessarily. I think her categorization is a bit broader than wife; she’s the person that you can depend on almost. Wifey’s almost like having your cake and eating it, too.

Ellen: [00:14:13] Is she part of the Kardashian appropriation of Black culture?

Dustin: [00:14:18] Oh definitely. The heart candies are now all words like bae; bae is something that was completely co-opted. I don’t remember a time I did not say bae. In the same way, I’ve never not known about having a squad. When it became a thing around early 2010 I was like, oh, that’s a thing now? To have a squad? I think it’s definitely a part of that conversation, a sort of sanitisation or a selling of Black popular vernacular culture. She’s definitely in that. 

But that’s also her engine—that's how she makes money. She does it so well, never saying too much. It’s always just a tag, it’s the wifey. Everything we’re doing with the term I’m making up, and she knows that we can do that. I think that’s what gives her space. She can just throw something out there and if she steps back from the crowd far enough—she’s always far enough from it that there’s nothing that happens with it.

Suus: [00:15:47] It’s an Internet thing, too, right? It’s not just Kim. It’s also that Black vernacular is a particular currency online. There’s this really cool book by André Brock, Distributed Blackness, about Black Twitter and Black Internet cultures and how they spread out. Maybe Kim as the influencer of all influencers has her own role in that ecosystem.

Ellen: [00:16:36] One last thought and then, unfortunately, I have to run to my student. In both of your projects, femininity or feminine identity is developed in relation to a man. This Lalla Essaydi character is part of a larger project on transvestism. I found that in colonial North Africa, there are all these transvestites, people dressing up as other genders, as other races. 

And then there’s all these postcolonial artists that use transvestism to deconstruct the category itself. On the one hand, Lalla Essaydi appropriates aspects of what has traditionally been male for a performance. That’s the thing about drag. It’s a performative identity, in which you, the viewer, know what’s supposed to be feminine and what’s supposed to be masculine and see that it’s all mashed up. Each of your projects relates to a man or the masculine, and involves performance. They’re all performing this gendered identity.

Suus: [00:18:47] What are responses to this artist’s work?

Ellen: [00:18:57] I think there are a lot of people who like it. I didn’t put this in my piece, but she’ll take a really famous painting, like the Odalisque, and restage it but with a real woman. The woman is wearing a white drape, so she doesn’t have her boobs hanging out, which is what the French painters always have. On the fabric, she writes pages of her own diary and calligraphy, in Arabic. And then the woman is just like looking at you, right? So instead of these drugged, blissed-out European paintings, you have this woman who is looking right in your soul, staring right at you. So there are some people that say, oh, you’re just repackaging this Orientalist stuff to make a buck. And she says no, I’m trying to use it to subvert it. But I think there are some people who will say that she’s just making pretty pictures, and making people feel comfy, seeing the harem all over again.

Suus: [00:20:16] That’s interesting—the performance can’t be too close to some presumed original or it becomes problematic and fraught. 

Ellen: [00:20:26] Or they don’t think it’s ironic or that it has to do with camp or irony around what’s straight and what’s not.

Suus: [00:20:38] Oh I think that’s really interesting: is the wifey an ironic wife?

Dustin: [00:20:43] What does it mean to try to subvert an original? What sort of problems do you get into when you do that? It’s always about the audience. Subversion is just difficult in general, because it’s so dependent on a sort of original document. 

Suus: [00:21:10] That arises especially once things start traveling, of course. If you do something, everyone in the audience knows the context and it’s situated. But if you become somebody like Kim Kardashian, it’s massive circulation either way, and you can’t control whether the audience will see irony or not. I can definitely say that for most of the women I study, there is very little irony going on. There’s a rather extreme earnestness, which is the other side of the coin—a particular gender performance where there can be no irony. It can’t come in because it would be dangerous.

Ellen: [00:21:58] Is there any humor? 

Suus: [00:22:04] Maybe I’m just not enlightened enough to grasp it. There’s lots of “the kids were being so funny,” but very little ironizing, where people say “I know what this looks like and I’m joking with you about it.” There’s almost none of that. Nah. They’ll sometimes say that they get approached in supermarkets for having many kids, and then they will take on the perspective of the audience—I know what this looks like to you. But it always pivots to actually, you are wrong for seeing this, for seeing something strange instead of seeing the way things should be. So even when that shift of perspective happens, it doesn’t actually. It can only strengthen the idea of being the true remnant, the last people still standing, holding on to what’s right. A lot of that type of language.

Ellen: [00:23:06] I’m so sorry I have to run to my student, because you’re helping me think! These different figures in the colonial context are appropriating what they are appropriating for a performance, riffing on this past in a way that is sometimes humorous or takes power. It has to do with this sense of “I’m me and not me at the same time.” And you can see both of those realities. Whereas these women say there’s one way that’s right and everything else is wrong, and I’m at war with the world. This is my worldview and everything has to be in it. Anything that’s not is a threat or bad or whatever. There can be no humor then. 

There’s another artist that I’m really interested in, a comedian called Gad Elmaleh. He has this stand-up called “The Other is Me,” and in part of it, he dresses as his own Moroccan grandma. He’s a Moroccan, Jewish, French Canadian comic. And he wears a headscarf and he’s shouting, he’s pretending to be his grandma. He wears fuzzy slippers, hairy legs, and an apron, yelling and jumping between French and Arabic. So, you know, he’s not really his grandma—he sort of is, but he also isn’t. By doing this at the same time, it’s funny. 

Achille Mbembe talks about humor as the way to get one up on power, to bust down power. If you can make fun of it, if you can twist it, if you can ironize it, you can master it a little bit. So there’s something about the presence and the absence of humor—I haven’t figured out what it is or what it means, but it seems to carry weight here. I’ll let you guys go. Thank you so much for organizing, I’m just under such a tsunami of stuff that it’s been bananas. 

Suus: [00:25:40] Honestly, I feel like we killed it, in a very short time frame.

Dustin: [00:25:46] I think so, too. We got everything in and it’s probably better that we were rushed, almost, because things are probably quite tight.

Suus: [00:25:56] Getting down to business!

This conversation relates to Ellen Amster’s study into "Lalla Essaydi," Dusty Gavin’s examination of KKKW Beauty's Fragrance Wifey, and Suzanne van Geuns’ research into biblical womanhood blogs.