Esmat Elhalaby - Parting Gifts of Empire - Nazar Speaker Series

Dark Opacities Lab is pleased to welcome Esmat Elhalaby, author of Parting Gifts of Empire, for a talk on his book, with response and in conversation with historians Allan E.S. Lumba and Wilson Chacko Jacob.

About the book:

Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization narrates an untold story of how Arabs and South Asians in the twentieth century sought to decolonize their minds. The histories of Palestine and India — both partitioned by the British Empire — are intimately linked.

In the face of similar imperially created chasms, Arab and Indian intellectuals reinvigorated centuries of shared histories to forge new horizons, new solidarities, new institutions, and new fields of knowledge. In this book, Esmat Elhalaby traces the forgotten lives of scholars like Wadi’ al-Bustani, revisits Arab and Indian feminist meetings, highlights gatherings such as Delhi’s 1947 Asian Relations Conference, and argues for the centrality of Palestine to the rise of the Third World. This book breaks new ground to unfold a global intellectual history of anticolonialism, Asian unity, pan-Islamism, and nonalignment in the making of what became known as the Global South.

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:

Esmat Elhalaby is an assistant professor of Transnational History at the University of Toronto. His first book, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization, was published by the University of California Press in 2025. He works primarily on the history of colonial and anti-colonial ideas from the nineteenth century to the present.