BOOK LAUNCH: ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY’S
THE JEWELERS OF THE UMMAH:
A POTENTIAL HISTORY OF THE JEWISH MUSLIM WORLD (2024)
VIAD IN COLLABORATION WITH VERSO BOOKS
ONLINE
31 January 2025
The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (2024) by أريئيلا عائشة أزولاي Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a powerful revisitation of those who were omitted from the story of Africa, as colonisation marks the continent’s extant borders. Prof Azoulay argues for the reclamation of indigenous worlds and for efforts to remake the world by unlearning imperialism. The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World offers poignant personal-political practice for those who are questioning how to connect the work of artmaking, everyday relations and ancestral knowing to the ongoing urgencies of anticolonial worldbuilding.
VIAD’s RADICAL | OTHERS, in collaboration with Verso Books, are honoured to present an online book launch to bring Azoulay’s critical questioning, worldbuilding and yearning project into proximity with other anticolonial thinkers and artmakers. In correspondence with Prof Jennifer Bajorek, Prof Alexandra Kokoli and other invited guests, Azoulay reflects on the art of writing letters as an anti-imperial text along with the art of jewellery-making as a reclamation of ancestral knowledges about the Jewish Muslim world. In the book, Azoulay documents working with her hands to drill precise openings into metals and weave patterns by threading connections. Making jewels, as her Jewish Muslim artisan ancestors would have made in precolonial Algeria, Azoulay accesses knowledge that is passed down without the hierarchy of text.
I discovered the epistolary space as a research tool to access and inhabit the debris of this destroyed world, and unexpected things began to unfold. At moments, it was quite magical, as the presumed presence of my addressees in this epistolary space exemplified and thereby troubled the role that the invented category of ‘the past’ plays in disrupting what could still be transmitted, exchanged, and renewed across generations.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 2025
Azoulay’s re-making of a world that was erased by colonisation’s project of historical destruction presents a profoundly intimate, kinship-building exercise where the personal is determinedly political. Her is a series of letters to other anticolonial thinkers as well as ancestors of her indigenous Algerian Jewish Muslim heritage. The author binds letter-writing − with its radical power in Black thought and anticolonial endeavours − to the work of getting to know oneself as an othered identity in order to reveal gaps in Africa’s construction.
In these letters, we refuse to comply with the termination of the Jewish Muslim world, a refusal that, we learn, is more luminous than the imperial orb that eclipsed that world and made everything to bring it to an end. In company, we don’t have to start from scratch. As their vivid memories of this world are made mine, I don’t have to unearth this world, but to inhabit it.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, 2025
At this special book launch, guests were invited as fellow seekers to draw connections with their varying practices of making and to ask themselves, as Azoulay does, how this form of worldbuilding may aid the work toward a liberated Palestine. VIAD’s RADICAL | OTHERS encourages guests to read the book excerpt “Letter 4 to Frantz Fanon. ‘With all my being I refuse to accept this amputation’” through the link provided before watching the recording of the event.
ABOUT PROF ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, lecturer at Brown University, teaches political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography, craft and jewelry to study onto-epistemological violence perpetrated through institutions and technologies like museums, archives and nation states. Potential history and unlearning imperialism, developed in her previous book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019) are key concepts and an approach that she has developed over more than a decade, concepts having far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival formations, museum and photography studies, as she shows in her two recent books The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso 2024) and Collaboration – A Potential History of Photography (co-edited with W. Ewald, S. Meiselas, L. Raiford, L. Wexler, T&H, 2023).
ABOUT PROF JENNIFER BAJOREK
Prof Jennifer Bajorek is a scholar and writer working on questions at the intersection of photography, art, and poetry. She has a particular interest in the aesthetic aftermaths of colonialism in French and Francophone worlds, with a cultural and geographic focus on Africa. At Hampshire, she teaches interdisciplinary courses on literature (fiction, experimental nonfiction, and poetry); photography and film; and philosophies of the image and of liberation.
ABOUT PROF ALEXANDRA KOKOLI
Prof Alexandra Kokoli is Associate Professor in Visual Culture at the University of Middlesex, London. She is an art historian and theorist originally trained in comparative literature. In her writings, Alexandra considers the aesthetic mobilisation of discomfort to political ends, focusing on art practices informed by and committed to feminism, the fraught but fertile relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, death, mourning and shame.
ABOUT PROF EMERY KALEMA
Prof Emery Kalema holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of the Witwatersrand. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at both the Institut de Sociologie at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (2021-2022) and South African Research Chair in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University (2017-2020). In addition, he was a Summer Program in Social Science Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2018-2019) and the winner of the competition for the inaugural Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD) Research Fellowship at New York University (Fall 2019).
