Machinic Jawari: On Gender, Slavery and Technology in the Medieval Middle East with Lamia Balafrej

About the event: 

Female domestic slaves designated as jawārī in Arabic (sing. jāriya) featured quite prominently in a range of medieval Arabic sources, including as automata or self-moving machines. They appeared, for example, as liquid-serving devices and timekeepers in treatises on the mechanical arts as well as poetic and historiographical texts. Scholarship on automated jawārī, however, has been scant and so has the study of gender, slavery and technology in medieval Islam. In this talk, Lamia Balafrej will consider the motif of the machinic jāriya against the history of household slavery, with a focus on the norms and expectations that regulated jawārī’s visibility and representability in the medieval Middle East. Balafrej will also interrogate the imaginary of the automated jāriya in relation to hydraulic technologies that have not yet been considered in tandem with issues of gender and slavery.

About the speaker: 

Lamia Balafrej is an associate professor of art history at UCLA specializing in the art of the medieval Islamic world. Her current project explores and historicizes the intersections of art, embodiment, technicity and labor, with a focus on both the artistic labor of and artistic depictions of the enslaved. Prof. Balafrej’s 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), where she explored Persian painting’s labor-intensive intricacy in relation to Persianate notions of representation, medium and authorship. Hailing from Morocco, Prof. Balafrej first studied literature at the University Mohammed V (Rabat, Morocco), before entering the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Paris in 2005. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Aix-Marseille in 2013. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, most recently the Rome Prize in Medieval Studies and a Getty Scholar Grant.

This event will take place in-person on the ASU Tempe campus in Lattie F. Coor Hall, 4th Floor, room 4403 and will be live-streamed through Zoom and posted on SHPRS' YouTube channel. If you register for Zoom, you will be sent a link 24 hours in advance of the lecture.