Zoé Samudzi - The Citizen and the Anthropophage - Nazar Speaker Series

Nazar is traditionally used as an amulet or talisman to ward off the evil eye and attendant feelings of jealousy or envy; it is generally understood in interpersonal terms and invests in a particular suspicion and superstition that is widely known across many parts of the global South, especially within global Islam. 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?

Nazar, as the study of anti-Muslim surveillance, arrives from journalist Vanessa Taylor’s newsletter Nazar, focused on harmful forms of statist technologies and vigilante forces surveilling Muslim communities. As an animating framework, Nazar might allow for otherwise theories of repelling the evil eye, the malevolence of the gaze. It might, too, allow for dispersing the structural forms of desire and disgust that compose sight as embedded in systemic forms of racism, fascism, and white supremacy.

For Dark Opacities Lab, the concept of Nazar includes not only the traditional meaning of the evil eye but also the psychoanalytic approach to racism. This approach seeks to understand what is to be coveted, where the envy lies, and where the repeated looking of jealousy reveals itself.

We are excited to welcome scholar Zoé Samudzi (Ohio State University) to Concordia. She present a talk entitled "The Citizen and the Anthropophage: The Cannibal Boom and Postcolonial Amnesias." In addition, this event will be hybrid (in-person and virtual), so please register if you plan to attend via Zoom. Please join us for this evening with Zoé Samudzi!

Speaker Bio:

Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty postdoc in the Department of African American and Africana Studies at Ohio State University and a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg. Her work contends with genocide memory and denialism, mythologies of the postcolonial African state, and the politics of visuality. Samudzi is also a writer and an associate editor of Parapraxis Magazine, as well as a co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018). She is a 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant grantee, a 2026 resident at La Becque’s Principal Residency Program, and an awardee of the 2026 Fire Station Studios' International Curator Residency.