Opacity as Method: Contemporary Muslim Femme Print and Material Cultures by Balbir K. Singh

Lecture
February 7, 2023 at 5:00–7:00pm
In-Person

Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University
Morrice Hall, Room 017
3485 Rue McTavish, Montreal, QC H3A 0E1


“In this piece, I center the possibility of opacity as method as a way of situating contemporary Muslim femme print and material cultures. I situate the racial and colonial fascination of Muslim femininity and femme-ness as, on the one hand, heavily defined by practices of veiling or unveiling, and on the other hand, policed on quotidian, embodied, and statist levels through forms of surveillance. As a response to such forms of fixation and harm, I theorize opacity and forms of cover—from privacy to redaction, from illegibility to counterveillance—as part of what I name the evasion of racial and colonial capture. Specifically, I read the work of contemporary Muslim femme artists, including Assia Boundaoui, Baseera Khan, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, to describe the anti-colonial creative methods that deploy forms of opacity as vital to their respective practices. Following the lead of scholars in surveillance studies, Black feminisms, Asian and Arab diasporic cultural studies, and feminist and queer of color critique, I study this artistic work as crucial to reorganizing both aesthetic and political strategies of seeing and sensing writ large.”