Ariella Aïsha Azoulay teaches political thought and visual culture at Brown University. She is the author of a number of books including Civil Imagination [2015] and Potential History [2019].
A tour de force of formal, conceptual, and historiographical innovation, not to mention ethical creativity. In keeping with Azoulay's historiographical innovation, not to mention ethical creativity. In keeping with Azoulay's terms-this powerful book refuses the partitioning of composite Arab and Jewish identities and shared forms of life in colonized Algeria. Azoulay reopens the foreclosed past by means of a dazzling epistolatory experiment. In letters to ancestors and elected kin (Hannah Arendt, Frantz remain. This work is a manifesto of repair in times of unconscionable violence. -- Leela Gandhi, author of <i>Affective Communities</i> Azoulay has thought deeply about the many specificities of Algerian Jews - people she calls Jewish Muslims-and draws lessons from their destroyed worlds. The Jewelers of the Ummah - which sparkles and glows like the heavy and handmade jewelry which Azoulay crafts to help her think differently - teaches readers how existing recitals of the past obscure luminous and complicated realities. It opens precious possibilities to think about Palestine as well as what anticolonial futures-freedom from every river to every sea-could look like. -- Todd Shepard, author of <i>The Invention of Decolonization</i> Colonialism severed the Jewish Muslim world, conscripting the Arab and Berber Jews of North Africa into the European settler project, initiating a violent historical erasure perpetuated under Algeria's nationalist conceits. Ariella Azoulay's quest to recover and restore this world has produced her latest masterpiece-a sublime, richly illuminating meditation on how and why decolonization requires repairing pre-and anti-colonial Muslim and Jewish entanglements. She communes with ancestors through letters, archives, and art as anti-imperialist refusal. This book is also a work of art, carefully crafted like the jewelry fabricated by her ancestors, forged in fire and strung together by revolutionary love and a profound responsibility to rebuild the ummah and remake the world. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of <i>Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination</i>