Reclaim
with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
“to be an Algerian Jew is to acknowledge that I am not a child of empire but the descendant of a world that empire aims to destroy…”
“Aïcha, why didn’t tell me that it was you? That before you were French and modern, as you appear in our family album, you were Arab and Jew? Berber and Jew? Muslim and Jew?”
“Colonialism expropriated Jews from imagining our own liberation.”
In this conversation between Taya Mâ & Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Ariella speaks from her newest work The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World, about why she calls herself a Jewish Muslim and shares letters she has written to her ancestors as multi-modal musings and manifestos toward dreaming a liberatory future.
As you unlearn colonialism, what changes in you? What wholeness do you have additional access to?
Write a letter to your ancestors ….
Who will you write? What are you called to say?
ariella aïsha azoulay
…is an author, curator of anti-colonial archives, film essayist, and theorist of photography. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. She is of Algerian and Palestinian descent and identifies as a Muslim Jew, which she powerfully unpacks in her article Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues. Azoulay recently completed a children’s story, Gold Threads, based on an early 20th century strike led by jewelers and gold spinners, acting also as guardians of the Muslim and Jewish world in Fes, Morocco. Ariella Aïsha’s newest book project is The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso 2024), and its companion film, the world like a jewel in the hand.