Anjali Nath – "A Thousand Paper Cuts" – Nazar Speakers Series

Dark Opacities Lab is pleased to welcome Anjali Nath, author of "A Thousand Paper Cuts" for a talk on her book, with response and in conversation with Dark Opacities Lab director Balbir K. Singh.

About the book:

In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral “Paper Curtain” to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America’s surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era’s exuberant secrecy to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.

About "Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye":

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?

About the speaker:

Anjali Nath is Assistant Professor in Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her first book, A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War, was published by Duke University Press in 2025.