Rehearsing Colonial Toxicity

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?

Please join us for our second event with historian, curator, and scholar of the built environment, Samia Henni. Henni is an assistant professor in the Peter Guo-Hua Fu School of Architecture at McGill University. She will present work related to her book, Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024).

How can you participate? Join us in person or online by registering for the Zoom Meeting or watching live on YouTube.

Have questions? Send them to info.4@concordia.ca