New Books in Nazar: The Jewelers of the Ummah x Black Elegies

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

As part of Dark Opacities Lab's 2024-2026 theme, "Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye," we will be hosting a speaker series to consider questions central to intellectual, political, and ethical questions integral to the context of global struggles for liberation and indigenous sovereignty. For the purposes of developing an anti-colonial theory of sight, we offer Nazar as a framework in which to triangulate race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis. They ask: What might it mean to think about surveillance and racist technology using Nazar as an animating framework? If they understand the harm caused by sight as surveillance, oversight, or violent watching, what might it mean to reconsider it as a protective or healing power, necessary and potentially having its own kind of magic?