Season 6, Episode 3: Transcript

Cheyenne Pettit: Historians often turn to the written word to share their historical work. And why not? A well-researched monograph can be a powerful tool for understanding the present world. But articles and monographs are not the only ways to interrogate historical questions, and they may not even be the most productive medium for every question. Historians are increasingly branching out from traditional written forms of historical storytelling and experimenting with new ways to do and teach history.

Dr. Rafael Neis is one such scholar. Neis, a professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan, is an ancient historian and interdisciplinary scholar whose 2023 book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, investigates “generation” (aka reproduction) and the creation of species in ancient Jewish writings and other sources in the Mediterranean, Southwest Asia, and North Africa. But Rafe is also an artist whose  modes and means of expression span from comics to paintings, and even sculpture. In fall 2024, Rafe curated an exhibit of their art titled KIN: Us and Our Kinds.

At KIN’s opening reception I was greeted by a sea of visitors chatting excitedly in the lobby of Lane Hall. What seemed like the most ordinary of settings on the campus of the University of Michigan was about to defy expectations. A colorful painting on the left featuring a smattering of avian and marine animal silhouettes atop a graph-paper checked background caught my attention immediately. The Flight of the Duckfish, oil on canvas, was a colorful mishmash of familiar silhouettes made remarkable through their juxtaposition. It was a perfect introduction to Rafe’s work; joyful and eagerly inquiring.

Welcome to season six of Reverb Effect, the podcast exploring how past voices resonate in the present moment. I’m Cheyenne Pettit, a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan Department of History and this year’s producer, showrunner, and host. 

In this episode we will consider how art and a focus on process over product can broaden the histories we tell—and those we teach our students.  

Cheyenne: Could you tell us a little bit about your exhibit KIN: Us and Our Kinds?

Rafe Neis: Absolutely. Um, so this exhibit in some ways is the collection of visual work that I’ve been doing alongside my scholarship for at least the past decade. And it parallels the research and writing for a book I recently published, which is called When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and The Reproduction of Species, as you might glean from that title or not. That book is about weird interspecies reproductive histories that are set in the ancient Middle East, and that explores primarily Jewish, but not just Jewish traditions around species, the ways that they mutate into each other and the ways that reproduction is an inherently unstable thing. So while I was writing this book, I coincidentally, utterly coincidentally being the same person who writes and paints, began to notice as if by magic themes related to species transformation and reproduction arising in my artistic practice, which I’ve been maintaining pretty consistently since grad school.

Cheyenne: So I’m curious, had you always intended or hoped to exhibit your own work?

Rafe: During grad school, I actually took painting classes and was part of exhibitions that were curated at that time. And in the first few years of working at U of M, which was also my first job post grad school, I continued to paint, but sort of shelved some of that exhibitionist side of the art, whilst focusing on completing my first book and just becoming more integrated as an instructor and kind of getting to know the landscape at the University of Michigan. So I would say I was much less integrated as an artist and scholar, and that these were more separate pursuits and my focus was really on exhibiting, also known as publishing my scholarship. And it really only in the past decade or so have I given myself permission to start to synthesize those sides of myself.

Cheyenne: In your artist biography in the exhibit space in Lane Hall, you’re described as an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and scholar. I’m curious what being interdisciplinary means for you.*re-record*

Rafe: I am not just multimedia, I’m interdisciplinary, but also not in the sense that we tend to use it in humanities context where we think of interdisciplinary as things like I do history and anthropology, or maybe even more radically I do history and ecology or bio biology or in some way. But actually for me here, interdisciplinary includes that kind of invest investigation among and between fields, but it also points to a way of doing art slash scholarship that incorporates artistic practice as scholarship in scholarship and vice versa synthesizes scholarship with artistic practice. And that is perhaps the most radical form of interdisciplinarity when taken from the point of view of conventional historical practice, historians seldom give themselves permission to utterly incorporate creative practice in different media in their scholarship.

Cheyenne [narration]: Rafe’s approach to interdisciplinarity is fitting for a scholar and artist whose work interrogates the limitations of classification. KIN itself is both art and history. KIN draws on ancient sources debating the nature of  kinship and humanity to populate the vivid paintings and sketches of the exhibit. In giving form to ancient voices, KIN bids visitors to consider what these perspectives can teach us about kinship today.  But KIN is also a reflection of Rafe’s personal emphasis on process over product. For Rafe, art and scholarship are an opportunity to think deeply together and not a demand to reach a single conclusion. It’s this appreciation of the power of process, and not only final products, that animates Rafe’s work and teaching.

Rafe: Last semester I taught a mini course called Making History Otherwise. It was a class that actually investigated, in a way, investigated the question less through why do historians not do this? And more fought through, let’s do this and let’s see what arises. So it was a mini course that offered folks space and, and it was couched that way, space and community to creatively craftily, improvisatory, pretend that’s an adverb, make history, but make in a hands-on sense.

Rafe: And so I explicitly invited half-baked ideas secretly, barely begun, novellas, bad art drawings, mini comic zines doodles, or just a sense that there must be something more to thinking than disciplining your ideas into academic prose. And that was explicit in the course description. And we did hands-on exercises, experiments.

Rafe: It was the historians who were the most enthusiastically embracing of the class, who just, you know, even kind of graced me with their good humor and willingness to do quite cheesy exercises. We did an exercise that I led that involved massive pieces of actually parchment paper baking, sort of chef’s paper that like the most cheap form of paper that I could acquire for the class.

Rafe: And we did these embodied drawing exercises where we sort of closed our eyes and sort of drew larger than life gestures that, uh, with a kind of guided meditation that I improvised that was designed to both bring us into our bodies, but also, uh, express a certain relationship to questions that we’re asking in scholarship through gestures. So all this is extremely cheesy in a way. And, uh, you know, maybe, uh, does not sort of seem to, um, benefit from the sanction of responsible rigorous scholarship. But I think opened things up for me and, uh, for others and led to a sense of community formation, laughter, experimentation, permission and critique of academic practice and the, uh, a space to voice critique that I know I so desperately crave. And I feel, I felt like I had peers in the classroom who also were glad to find a space to vocalize some of those ways that academic practice and the socialization into becoming a historian often means not giving oneself permission to do things, narrowing one’s world. I dunno if that speaks to you at all.

Cheyenne: I’m really struck by what you said when you talk about this sort of cheesy activity that you’re doing with your students. And I will just be honest and say I was a former preschool teacher. Mm. And I still bring these sorts of cheesy activities into my undergraduate classrooms. And I was nervous about that at first because of course, like when you think about some of the things that I do and include, like movement exercises, mimicking, because I’m a medical and military historian, I’ve had students mimic a tank formation and had other students like crumple paper balls and throw them at them as a way to understand what it’s like to be in a World War I tank where things are going on around you. You are not able to move independently, you’re relying on someone else in a very high pressure situation. And to try and get them to understand and connect with the innate humanity, that is the study of history in my opinion.

Cheyenne [narration]: Among Rafe’s exhibited pieces there hung a comic drawn in black ink titled Those Rabbis! Like their 2023 book, When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven: Rabbis and the Reproduction of Species, Those Rabbis! invites readers to reconsider their assumptions about kinship through the relation of an ancient dilemma. When a human gives birth to a raven, is that raven kin? Specifically, if the raven’s brother dies shortly after being married and without having children, should the raven be called upon to marry the widow, as ancient custom demanded? Rabbi Yannar declares in the seventh panel that “If his body is human but his face is animal, he is not offspring. But if his body is animal and his face is human, he is offspring.” In the final panel, a figure with a human body and bovine head tilts his head quizzically at a scroll with a final question scrawled across the top—“So you would tell him, ‘come let us slaughter you?’”

Cheyenne: Could you talk a little bit about how you approached telling this story differently in these two mediums and what they could do for you that maybe the other one couldn’t?

Rafe: I take passages or narratives from the Talmud, a multi-generational document that was produced in Palestine from around the third to fifth centuries. And another version of it was produced in Babylonia, which is modern day Iraq from around the third to the seventh century. There are two distinct traditions of this particular historical document, and it’s little read outside of particular modern day rabbinic communities, Jewish communities. And it’s often part of the diet of Orthodox cis Jewish men and boys.

Rafe: But other than that, it is also plumbed by ancient Jewish historians because it gives you a really fascinating insight into the literature of a Jewish sub elite in Roman Palestine and in Persian ruled Mesopotamia or Iraq. So it straddles two imperial centers in late antiquity. And there was also back and forth between these communities. So you have records of each community in each other’s Talmud, as it were, in each other’s documents. It tells stories about rabbis traveling back and forth. There are parallels. They’re often cribbing from each other. And this particular story is about humans who give birth at points to non-humans. And it asks questions about kinship classification, who is killable, who, um, bears the responsibility for reproductive futurity and the perpetuation of kinship. It asks questions about masculinity, about virility and about offspring. So it, in one of the stories, it imagines that somebody gives birth to a creature that is partly bull and partly human.

Rafe: And the question becomes, do you slaughter that creature because they’re kosher? Or do you marry that creature off to your dead son’s widow who did not have children in order to perpetuate the petrol line? Which sounds like a laughable and, and funny story in some ways, but also a tragic story. And I, by illustrating that story, or doing more than illustrating by visualizing that story in comic form, I feel like something came, something of the pathos and humor and absurdity came out that I wasn’t able to express simply by citing the, the primary source and analyzing it and using academic rhetorical techniques to persuade you that it is right historically to both read the story as humor and pathos without trying to retrospectively diagnose it.

Rafe: And they’ll say, oh, this is clearly a miscarriage, and this means that they were looking at these fetuses and misidentifying them as animals. Or this is an example of a human who gives birth to another human that is, has a severe bodily disability. And I think there’s something to be said for that. But there’s also something that is extremely anachronistic. When we reduce ancient worlds to modern retrospective diagnosis, what we lose is the world building that is happening, and that I do not read historical sources like that. I read these sources as different kinds of worldviews in which not only is reproduction radically unstable, but the mimetic, the, the obviousness of species and its stability is not taken for granted. So we live in a world where we take for granted that like begets like, and we classify any deviance from that as disabled.

Rafe: Sometimes we classify it as trans, sometimes we classify, right, that we have all kinds of language that with which we classify things that, or entities or beings that deviate from the norm. We have language, you know, in some ways DEI language is born from that classificatory impulse. And I’m wondering about a world in which it’s not taken for granted that gender or species is stable and guaranteed. And that that openness to slippage and unpredictability even happens in birth right in the reproductive scenario, because we are living in a world in which also people can metamorphosize and transform, right?

Rafe: It’s a suspension of the need to domesticate primary sources, resources to, um, the restrictions of our own narrow present.

Cheyenne [narration]: In the right hand corner of the exhibit, alongside the bright paintings of animal figures, comics, and sketches sat a clinical looking glass cabinet. Inside the cabinet a series of gleaming metal forceps hung beside needle gauges and circular instruments. Underneath the surgical devices sit two small animal figures. One with a blue face and the other a red face. Each creature’s physical form has been modified into a new animal shape using white modeling clay. The installation calls to mind images from nineteenth-century cabinets of curiosity, which were European precursors to museums. Wealthy Europeans collected unusual objects from across the world, often stolen from colonized peoples, to display in their homes. These displays were intended to speak to the owner’s wealth, power, and personal travels.

Cheyenne: As I was looking at this installation, I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about what the relationship you see between bodily transformation medicine and kin making in this exhibit. 

Rafe: I knew I wanted to use it because it very much reminds me of this nine late nineteenth, early twentieth century, and the last still continuing kind of natural history museum science, museum medical display, cabinet of curiosity type, display space. I had a kind of an inkling that I would continue the themes of the exhibition, which were about the slippage between species, including humans and non-human species, and about the relationship between that slippage and transness in a way, or the becoming and changing of human embodiments.

Rafe: I also realized I wanted to incorporate something that I hadn’t really in the other works, which was something that was addressing medicalization classification and sanitization of human and animal difference, which we know from lan before. Lan after LAN involves gender and race, right? We know that that that also kind of is what begets and bequeaths racist science eugenics, right? We know that those relationships actually between zoology and biology are key.

Rafe: So what I did was to take actually a set of found objects, a set of toys that belonged to my little toddler plastic animals. And I worked with those, and I actually hybridized them in a way with clay to create, in a certain sense trans species entities. So I took the little polar bear and I sculpted a face with some hair on it. And so if you look at those creatures that I have, they are all actually transposed upon little plastic toy artifacts. Somehow they became, many of them ended up looking like creatures that had this, let’s just say labial and clitoral, um, citation, which was just pure coincidence. And then when I noticed that I ran with it and I included some other pieces that spoke to the slippage between animals and in a way gender classification and modification.

Rafe: So I was thinking about how when I had top surgery, my friend slash surgeon said to me that, you know, we spoke about some people don’t actually keep their nipples, and I wanted to keep my nipples. And I said, how are you gonna do that? What are you gonna do? She said, she said, I’m gonna cut them off, and then I’m gonna put them on a tray, and then I’m gonna take a cookie cutter, if you like, and I can make them smaller because, so-called mask nipples are smaller, which I find hilarious. But I, I decided to do that. And I was just struck by that imagery of the cookie cutter and the, the relationship actually between sculpture and surgery, art and surgery. So this is sort of also thinking about medicalization and in a way art. So it’s both a critique and a certain kind of embrace of the joy and creativity in bodily transformation. 

Rafe: And so I crafted also some nipples, and some of my found objects involve sterilized instruments that are used both for surgery and sculpture. So they’re very similar instruments are used for surgery, dentistry, and sculpture with wax and clay. I was really leaning into that. Actually the same tools are used for instruments of transformation in these fields. And so I have actually a couple of nipples, one before and one after being resized with a cookie cutter, which is part of the display. So you’ll see in the display a bunch of these instruments and that are speaking to these kind of elements of becoming the clay itself that I used due mostly to the fact of what was available is clay that dries white. And I was also keen to think about the way white is often encoded racially.

Rafe: And this is also why I then decided to add color, color that is in some ways outside of human colorist skin tone designations blues and reds and oranges to signify my awareness about the way color and racial classification work. And to try to also then hint that this whiteness is not necessarily the white of whiteness. So that’s also what I’m doing with, with, you know, I didn’t want to necessarily use brown clay to signify the way that that is racialized. I wanted to disrupt the automatic as assignation of whiteness that is, was embraced by renaissance sculpture racially, to also remind us that sculpture in many cultures is also not white and is highly colorized, with colors that are outside of human skin pigmentation. So I was trying to signal awareness as well of the racialization of art itself. There’s a lot of themes packed in there, and I’m not even getting to the fact that I have a couple of old school stainless steel injections that speak to, that are actually veterinary injections, but also are citing for me some people who take testosterone or estrogen.

Rafe: Again, very similar tools that I also have, forceps that are used both in veterinary and gynecological contexts. Again, these fascinating overlaps, like if you go online and want to buy, buy these sorts of things, you’ll find that they’re often labeled as doing both. Yeah. So check it out. There’s also a pair of tephillin, which are Jewish phylacteries, which are these actually ancient amulets that are still worn today, traditionally worn by cis Jewish men. And I’m putting them in there. And of course, in more liberal forms of Jewishness are worn by all genders, and I just sort of snuck them in there. You can barely see them. They’re these really cool boxes that you wear and that they come there with these straps, they look, look kind of like leather kink, and they’re kind of snuck in there as a gentle gesture towards the ways also that gender and species transformation are ritualized.

Cheyenne [narration]: Art and history exhibits alike are invitations. Whether it is an oil painting or coin from ancient Rome, exhibit pieces are curated to invite visitors to a conversation. Unlike books, which have carefully edited conclusions, exhibits are designed to leave visitors with questions. Therein lies both the promise and the difficulty of exhibition. Rafe and I discussed the myriad responses that visitors to KIN expressed. Many visitors delighted in KIN’s joyful contemplation of what brings beings together into communities of kinship, while others struggled with KIN’s exploration of bodily transformation. When it comes down to art or history, what do we make of visitors who recoil at exhibits they find controversial?

Rafe: Some aspects of it will be less aesthetically approachable to some people, and some aspects may be more aesthetically approachable to those same people. And that’s actually partly why it’s actually a heterogeneous collection, because I wanted to ease people, some people in who might otherwise, you know, there’s some images in which bovine type people with strap ons are dancing around with other types of folks who have surgical marks on their chests and, in a kind of party-like fashion that was, was also citing Greek vase painting, ancient Greek vase painting. And I imagine if I put those images first, it could perhaps it would be less absorbable by certain folks. And so I actually sequence things so that those would, would, would, would be met with later on in the show.

Rafe: I mean, to be honest, I am slightly delighted that not everybody found the work. You know, there’s something important that’s happening there, and I want to kind of recognize that that, that that was also a reaction and it might be a reaction. It is stunning to me that one can say that art should be political, but not this kind of political. There’s a perverse part of me that loves that. And I also don’t regard it as that political, to be honest. You know, if a strap on is political, then where are we? But I guess we are here, is where we are. But I do think that it is not a coincidence that your American art will gladly display a Greek vase with a non prosthetic penis.

Rafe: And that is not seen as controversial, but that a closeup of say over a very exuberant display, say of labia would be considered controversial, which is also partly why those pieces that I alluded to, it was important to me that they actually evoked labia. That was, because that’s not something we let ourselves look at in conventional Euro-American art, although we look at female nudes, right? So somehow this kind of interesting way in which penises are acceptable, and female bodies as a whole are acceptable. But then when you have the citation of that tradition, but you replace the penis with a strap on, it becomes controversial. And when you add maybe top surgery scars, that becomes controversial to me. That’s fascinating that I am curious and I have a certain desire for that response to be there for that person to see that art, that discomfort is important.

Rafe: And the more that art is out there, I wonder what happens to that discomfort if it actually becomes I’m not interested in stoking controversy for the sake of controversy, but I’m curious if someone like that can go the next step and ask themselves why is it controversial? What is evoked for them? I’m curious if I had been around to engage that person in conversation, that feels to me like a really interesting and important conversation that we don’t have often enough.

Cheyenne: And that’s an opportunity to realize there are differences of opinion in the world. There’s a multiplicity of thought. And I think challenging those preconceived notions in the academy, in exhibits with our students is the beginning of where change and self-reflection can start.

Cheyenne: So Rafe, what does kinship mean to you? 

Rafe: So it’s partly about that kind of kinship across species, and it’s partly about kinship as alternatives to the white, cis hetero middle class nuclear family. So it’s a resistance, it’s a kind of joyous resistance and celebration of kinship. It’s deliberately not using the term family. I will say that, you know, I’m part of, uh, among my affiliations, I am part of what people have recently dubbed family, but never did until small people joined our pack. We call ourselves a pack, many adults beyond myself and my spouse, um, a bunch of children, a bunch of animals, some of which live in one household, some of which are spread in neighboring households. And that idea of a pack, which, you know, a pack of wolves, a pack, you know, is, is deliberately taken, we use that term to describe ourselves, to celebrate, are into species connections, to resist the ways that people now say, how is your family to me? Which they only did since the little humans joined the pack, not when the little cats joined the pack. And that how is your family is meant well because we are now legible, but it ignores actually preexisting and concurrent bonds of kinship that are equally strong and full of love and joy and pain and celebration and mourning that go beyond that to parent to child thing, which sort of exists, but is actually only the tip of the iceberg.

Rafe: As historians of gender or the family, we of all people benefit from seeing the radical historical contingency of those terms, but we often do. But then in our lives, we just reenact and re discipline ourselves according to them. I really recommend the world work of Kim Tallbear who is a wonderful indigenous scholar, Native American First Nations, you know, scholar, working now in Canada, and who writes precisely about kind of the Euro colonial limitations of these ideas of family cis heterosexuality as actually impositions and points to these. It’s not even that they’re not categorizable, they are categorizable in many cultures, but they’ve been a face, there’s been a kind of epistemicide along with genocide of these ways, of knowing our interconnectedness, our deep physical material interconnectedness with non-human beings, dead and alive, human and non-human and signaling.

Rafe: So I feel that with art, I can push through that because I think that we can visualize other worlds, not just other possible worlds, other worlds that are already here that we don’t see or we don’t want to see, or that we only want to see as past and dead, but they’re actually vibrant and alive.

Cheyenne: Thank you for listening. Thank you to Dr. Rafael Neis for their time. Our production team is Talitha Pam, Markus Merin, and Sophie Wunderlich. And I’m your host and season producer, Cheyenne Pettit. This is Reverb Effect.