As part of the work of Dark Opacities Lab, this project conceives a postcolonial theory of sight that invests in reading race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis together. Specifically, I ask: How does Nazar, an amulet or talisman used in warding off the evil eye and attendant feelings of jealousy or envy, offer a way of triangulating race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis in the contemporary? How might this help think the colonial anew, insofar as it necessitates reckoning with latent settler fears of the global majority? Nazar is a way of thinking with global Islam and offers a possible mode of conceiving new forms of sight and new lines of flight from the racist gaze and its carceral technologies. In doing so, I hope to uncover a relation between, on the one hand, sight, vision, the gaze, surveillance—the evil eye itself; and on the other hand, opacity, which I have defined previously as the evasion of racial and colonial capture, to ward off the evil eye. Specifically, what might it mean to imagine Nazar as protection from surveillance and racist technology as an animating framework? If we might understand forms of sight itself as surveillance, as oversight, as a watching that is harmful, that is potentially violent, then what might it mean to consider forms of protection from such sight as necessary, as potentially having its own kind of magic?

Nazar might also consider what it means to situate the psychoanalytics of racism that are embedded in the theory of the evil eye. I explore Nazar as a mode of warding off the evil eye, the violence of the gaze, spending time with the work of Ariella Azoulay as a way of structuring how we understand the colonial and imperial foundations of our relations to art, archives, and their repositories.