Call for Contributions: Edited Collection

“Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye”

Edited by Balbir K. Singh and Prathna Lor

Call for Contributions:

“Nazar: A Theory of the Evil Eye” develops a theoretical and political framework inspired by the cobalt and sky-blue amulet most often referred to as “Nazar.” This framework is situated at the nexus of race, colonialism, and psychoanalysis, utilizing the protective power of the amulet to consider otherwise strategies of repelling the gaze and similar forms of harmful sight. While the amulet is often understood in interpersonal terms, for our purposes, a structural consideration of Nazar enables a significant way to rethink relations of power. As a talisman, Nazar takes the form of the very gaze that is harmful—the “evil eye”—in order to turn it back on itself as an act of repelling and thus protection. This cooptation of the malevolent glare is the seductive method that informs our approach to the collection. Nazar here functions not simply as a provocative metaphor, but as an animating force, reconsidering global structures, forms of violence, and the practices with which we may reorient, adjust, and/or possess entirely the encroaching.

Everywhere is structured by the eye as partial object: the camera, the drone, AI, the algorithm, the network. As a technology itself, how does Nazar intervene into other technological prowesses and developments? What is the signifying power of Nazar as a superstitious tool and its possibilities for responding to, or even nullifying, the machinic and the digital, the historical and the not-yet? 

On the one hand, this edited volume studies how myriad forms of sight and vision are psychically structured by both conscious and unconscious desires, including greed, envy, and animosity; it takes these readings of gratuitous and malevolent desire and reorients the psychic with the material, the political, and the global. On the other hand, Nazar as method opens up possibilities for revisioning, offering perspectival shifts that renew–or imagine completely anew–the world and our being (or non-being) in it. 

While the common association of Nazar is with Arab, North African, West and South Asian cultures, this collection also invests in global traditions of superstition around the evil eye more broadly. Given the rootedness of analysis of the evil eye through anthropological and folkloric scholarship and discourse on totems, talismans, spirits, and superstition, this collection uses such scholarship as a point of departure from which to reanimate such thinking in the contemporary political and social landscape. This framework then reads the world’s polycrisis through the many antagonisms that structure the contemporary world order as operating on historic and ongoing antagonisms; the collection argues that we might analyze such antagonisms as based on entrenched modes of perception, from supremacy to surveillance, from civilizationalism to survival of the fittest. 

Appropriately, as tool and method, Nazar perverts genre. We invite submissions for a proposed edited collection that considers Nazar in expansive and daring ways from a variety of disciplines and practices, across the theoretical and the experimental—essays, dialogues, collaborative endeavours, and critical work that may play with, or eschew completely, the essay form.

Please submit 500-word abstracts (for essays between 8,000-10,000 words; other formats could vary in length) as an attachment, along with a short bio, to both Balbir K. Singh and Prathna Lor at info@darkopacitieslab.com by August 15, 2026. Accepted abstracts will be notified by September. Chapter drafts will be due by June 1, 2027.