Professor Lamia Balafrej will be delivering a talk at Rice University for the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture Series. Her presentation, entitled “Race Before Technology: On Medieval Talismans”, will take place on March 6 at 3:00pm.
Professor Balafrej explains:
“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.”
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