Katherine Brown Lecture: Dr. Lamia Balafrej

The Department of Art History welcomes everyone to the final Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture of the semester featuring Dr. Lamia Balafrej, Associate Professor of the Arts of the Islamic World at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Balafrej specializes in the Middle East and North Africa. “Race Before Technology: On Medieval Talismans” Thursday, March 6 | 3:00PM Moody Center for the Arts, Double Studio Classroom (2nd fl) ***RSVP by scrolling down*** Registration is strongly encouraged. A light reception will follow the lecture. This event is free and open to the Rice community and public.

In critical studies of race, technology has been increasingly metaphorized, used to describe racialization as an implacable, predictable mechanism of classification and difference-making. Meanwhile, numerous studies have revealed the biases inherent to digital technologies, how AI systems function to accelerate inequality and racism. In this talk, I take a longer view of the enmeshment of race and technology, by focusing on medieval Islamicate talismans. Medieval talismans have generally been approached as powerful yet politically rather benign artifacts, with no connection to such issues as racialization. Few scholars thus have considered, critically, what remains a talisman’s essential operation: creating, indeed sensing, a difference between outsiders and insiders. Walls with protective efficacy were chief among such talismans, and so were frontier automata, with their ability to detect and stop threatening, often othered enemies. Comparing pre-modern talismans to today’s algorithms will prove helpful in teasing out the medieval specificities of race-making techniques, while providing a transhistorical, contrastive framework for understanding race as technology. Lamia Balafrej is Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. Her current book project, Slavery in the Machine, explores historical intersections of technology, slavery, and figuration, using comparative, contextual, and visual approaches. The project has been supported by a 2023 Rome Prize and a 2023 Getty Scholar Grant. Slices of this research have appeared as articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated slaves and noneffective machines (2022), and images of domestic slavery and skin color (2021). Her interest in the relation of body and instrument grew out of her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), which examined Persian painting’s visual intricacy in tandem with period notions of authorship, medium, and representation. Hailing from Morocco, she is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and received her PhD from the Université Aix-Marseille.