Nazar Speaker Series - Ariella Aïsha Azoulay x Kimberly Juanita Brown

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. We ask: What might it mean to think about surveillance and racist technology using Nazar as an animating framework? If we 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?

This event is entitled: "New Books in Nazar: _The Jewelers of the Ummah_ x _Black Elegies" and will feature scholars Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Brown University) and Kimberly Juanita Brown (Dartmouth College), who will speak about their newer work in a set of talks, followed by a conversation with Concordia scholars Balbir K. Singh (Art History; Director of Dark Opacities Lab) and Joana Joachim (Art History).