10/15/2024
Race Before Algorithms: On Medieval Talismans | A lecture by Lamia Balafrej
October 29, 2024
5 - 7 p.m.
308A Doe
Medieval talismans have generally been defined as efficacious, prognostic artifacts, endowed with protective or therapeutic qualities—all in all, as powerful yet politically rather benign objects. Few scholars have expanded the discussion to consider, critically, what remains a talisman’s essential operation: creating, indeed sensing, a distinction between insider and outsider. This talk will explore potential examples of talismanic discrimination from the Mediterranean to Southwest Asia with an emphasis on frontier talismans, considered in tandem with medieval conceptions of race, ethnicity, and foreignness. A comparison with predictive algorithms, known for perpetuating racial bias, will also prove helpful in teasing out the medieval specificities of race-making technologies, while providing a transhistorical, contrastive framework for understanding race as technology.
Bio: Lamia Balafrej is Associate Professor of the Arts of the Islamic World at UCLA. Her current book project, Slavery in the Machine, explores intersections of technology, unfreedom, and figuration from the Mediterranean to Southwest Asia, with a comparative, transhistorical perspective. Slices of this research have appeared as articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated slaves and nonefficient 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 the work of visual intricacy in light of Persianate notions of authorship, medium, and representation.
