Nazar

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?

Nazar, as the study of anti-Muslim surveillance, arrives from journalist Vanessa Taylor’s newsletter Nazar, focused on harmful forms of statist technologies and vigilante forces surveilling Muslim communities. As an animating framework, Nazar might allow for otherwise theories of repelling the evil eye, the malevolence of the gaze. It might, too, allow for dispersing the structural forms of desire and disgust that compose sight as embedded in systemic forms of racism, fascism, and white supremacy.

For Dark Opacities Lab, the concept of Nazar includes not only the traditional meaning of the evil eye but also the psychoanalytic approach to racism. This approach seeks to understand what is to be coveted, where the envy lies, and where the repeated looking of jealousy reveals itself. Why might it be vital to consider this in light of the recent resurgence and acceleration of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence, particularly in the form of anti-Palestinian racism? 

From 2024 to 2026 Dark Opacities Lab will center Nazar as a mode of warding off and returning the evil eye through the amulet–with the possibility of staring back, defiantly. With this in mind, we aim to collectively study, theorize, and organize around the following themes and ideas embedded in Nazar, as part of a preliminary theory of the evil eye: