Third Text

7 January 2025

Angela Dimitrakaki interviews Ariella Aïsha Azoulay about her book published by Verso, 2024

Angela Dimitrakaki:    Firstly, on method: The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World is among the most conceptually original book-length studies we currently have. It takes the epistolary form (the letter that has a sender-writer and a designated recipient-reader) and turns it into an experimental mode of historical research. It is composed of many parts – your introduction, which explains the project; the addressee biographies, which tell us who the recipients are; the letters as such, which have titles and not only recipients; and even the acknowledgements, running for four pages and thus not being just ‘acknowledgements’ but a tentative closure that embeds the book into something larger and durational: your effort to reveal a historical truth across many studies and with many interlocutors. Why did you choose the epistolary form?

Ariella Aisha Azoulay:    I’m touched by the way you perceive the book. This is the first book I’ve written without knowing from the start who its readers would be and if it would have readers at all, as some can (wrongly) perceive this book as ‘niche’ (a book about or for ‘Jews’…). In a way, it is not a book written for readers in the ‘imperially modern’ sense of the word – ie members of a disembodied imagined community named ‘the public’ who are invited to act freely in what is known as ‘the public sphere’. Such a sphere was shaped in Europe through the destruction by European actors of numerous embodied communities across the many territories they seized and plundered within and outside of the colonies. Each and every letter implies a refusal to address disembodied readers – anyone and no one at the same time, as the academic writing style beckons – and engages, rather, with named addressees while also inviting others (this is why these are open letters) to take part in this epistolary space where imperial ruins are identified, named, inhabited, repaired, reclaimed and transformed. The book invites people to disown the underacknowledged privilege to engage in conversations about imperial crimes of destruction without overtly situating themselves in the conversation and asking themselves who they are, how they are implicated in the broad destruction of worlds, and how they engage with unlearning and undoing the lingering effects of their inherited positionings.

I certainly experiment throughout the book with many different ways of accounting for what became history, or histories. But, all the while, I retain a spirit of experimentation, which is crucial because the premises or patterns of writing history are such that whenever we disobey them, we are in the experimental. However, if we think about this book outside of the lineage of history writing and place it in the context of the long anticolonial labour of rejecting the historic imperial verdicts that bury our destroyed worlds alive, what I’m doing is more like joining my kin and elected kin in their battle by refusing to engage with them as dead voices and with our shared worlds as unhabitable ruins. If the acknowledgments are four pages long, that is partly because the publication of earlier versions of some of the letters led many Algerians to address me, write me letters, send me images, tell me about many things that they assumed (and rightly so) were not transmitted to me because an imperial rupture alienated me from the world of my ancestors. Engaging with me was these readers’ way of acting not as disembodied readers but, rather, as participants in the animation of these ruins. Together with them, I – we – could inhabit the Jewish Muslim world which was viciously emptied of its Jews by several European projects.

The destruction of the Jewish Muslim world is not a recognised event that one could search for and find in history books. Given that, this form of semi-collective writing – in the sense that I’m not alone in the epistolary space but am thinking together with my interlocutors – is a way of staging with others the conditions for this destruction to appear as a disavowed truth that our co-presence unsettles. I think about the pursuit of truth not as a quest to unearth a specific content – something that can be manipulated or fabricated through the exclusion of the knowledge and perspectives of different groups of people – but, rather, as a commitment to maintaining the condition for such a quest to exist, meaning a quest that is open to everyone and in which everyone can participate. In other words, when some act to hide the truth, it is not only about the content concealed but also about the person or peoples forbidden from pursuing it and whose exclusion is part of the truth and testifies to the damage it brings to the condition of truth-telling.

AD:   Secondly, on content: your introduction to the book bears a revealing title: ‘Who am I? Inhabiting the Jewish Muslim World’. There is a personal but no less political and historical stake in saying this. In the introduction you say ‘to be an Algerian Jew is to inhabit Jewish Muslim conviviality. It is also a commitment to imagining that conviviality’s repair and renewal on a global scale... I’m not a child of empire but the descendent of a world that empire aims to destroy.’ Is the book trying to reveal both the causes and processes of this destruction?

AAA:   I’m not sure I have much to say about the causes, but ‘yes’ about processes of destruction. Through discussions of the way they impacted – and continue to impact – my interlocutors and me, different patterns of destruction emerge, depending on the addressee.

The scale of destruction across the globe is so grand that in order to account for it we should refrain from inhabiting the solid position that academia, journalism and art shaped for us, that of the fictional speaking person who is no way related to what they are accounting for. Instead, everyone ought to pose the question of who we are in the wake of such cosmic annihilation, which has for so long been narrated by the perpetrators, or the beneficiaries of perpetrators, who deliver these accounts as stories of progress. In so doing, such perpetrators and beneficiaries have shaped a discourse in which they are allowed to speak the truth without revealing who they are, obscuring how their accounts are premised on the long-term exclusion of others. In the letters, I try not to describe destruction as an object or something that has been completed – ie something that no longer exists except as or in ‘the past’ – nor to consign us, its survivors, to a different tense, the one that follows – ie the present. Rather, I dwell in the ruins as a site wherein we – my interlocutors and me – practice our ontological refusal to disappear.

Myself, I am a residue of such a refusal, as I managed to excise myself from the narrative of colonial futurity that threatened to bury Palestine forever through making me believe that I was Israeli, an invented identity that was fabricated barely fourteen years before my birth as part of the proclamation of the state of Israel. Ontological refusal is when our mere existence – who we are, not the national identities designate to us – refutes our alleged disappearance into this imperial futurity of the nation-state. In these epistolary spaces, wherein the remnants of these destroyed worlds – ie myself and my ancestors – are animated in saying ‘We are Muslim Jews, descendants of the jewellers of the ummah’, we carve out these forms of belonging from underneath the suffocating imaginary of the nation-state, which has been imposed as a liberatory project everywhere.

Crafting a potential history of the Jewish Muslim world means taking seriously the fact that we are the living ruins of worlds that imperialism is committed to make disappear. Asking ‘who am I?’ is not done in order to elicit an answer, but in order to make space for these ruins that are me, in me, to be the elements out of which a retrospective continuity is made possible. Asking ‘who am I?’ means breaking apart the cohesiveness and solidity of the identities assigned by the settler colonial state to children born within its borders; and it means rejecting that state’s attempt to use us as the spokespersons of those identities by refusing to embrace them as a manifestation of our intimate selves. In the company of my kin and elected kin, those remnants of our ancestral worlds can no longer be disavowed.

AD:    In your book, you have no less than sixteen ‘addressees’, people to whom your letters are addressed, both as singular enquiries, but also as a collective enquiry through which a dialogue is enacted – not just between you and them, but also among the addressees themselves, as well as between you, the letter recipients and the book’s readers (myself, for example). How did you choose your addressees, who include members of your family and ancestry but also very diverse authors whose names are associated with exposing colonialism and coloniality as a brutal state imposed on the world? And also, is the reader of the book as such the addressee, in the last instance?

AAA:    Each letter obviously has its own genesis story, but they all have as a starting point a certain gratitude that I felt toward each addressee for opening a path into this ancestral world. Without the presence of each addressee and that of others, we could still be trapped in the imperial epistemology whose mode of violence involves making us believe in the achievement of imperialism’s goals, that is, making us believe that we, its ruins, do not exist except as that which empire aims to fashion in its factories. The letters thus take as a point of departure our – mine and my addressees’ – existence, in its broken way, as the living proof of our ancestral world’s existence, despite being ruined, since we chose to inhabit it.

If I mention gratitude as one of the points of departure, it is because it determined my decision, for example, not to finally write a letter to Adolph Crémieux, who co-authored the 1870 French decree (which carries his name) forcing Algerian Jews to become French citizens in their own country. His role in exiling us from the Jewish Muslim world forms the edge of my revolutionary love. I did choose to write a letter to Benjamin Stora, despite the radical difference in our approach to the Jewish Muslim world – for him it is history, meaning that it’s over; for me it is a potential history, what could and should still be inhabited and repaired – because of his immense contribution to the collection and publishing of what he considers ‘shards’ of this world (or what I see as broken landmarks in a world that is still here for us to inhabit and reclaim).

While I knew I would write a letter to my father, whose death twelve years ago sparked my return to our ancestral world, I didn’t think I would write one to my mother, which I finally did. The fact that, at the beginning, a letter to her seemed to be outside of the scope of this project (situated mainly in the Maghreb) is only because our mental geographies are so deeply imprinted by imperialism’s scissors and graveyards. After all, my maternal and paternal families lived for centuries within the same Ottoman Empire – the paternal line in Algeria and Morocco, and the maternal line in Bulgaria, Turkey and Palestine – and both families moved within its borders. Retracing the history of my maternal family and the constant movement of its members between different parts of the Ottoman Empire allowed me to also reject the Zionist appropriation of this side of my family’s history and to undermine the treatment of my great-great-grandmother’s migration to Palestine as if it were part of the Zionist migration to Palestine. As you can see, inhabiting the Jewish Muslim world also requires working hard to undo the layers and layers of historiographical lies that Zionists propagated and cemented as ‘our’ histories.  Understanding how my mother was made ignorant of our family’s anti-Zionist and anti-patriotic legacies, as well as how she was made unaware of the importance of writing in our Sephardic family heritage – which contradicted the way Sephardim were treated in the Zionist colony as if they had no culture – enriched the resonances I discuss between the human factories installed by the French, as part of the colonisation of Algeria, and the ones installed by the Zionists against diverse Jews who were either Palestinian Jews (like my maternal family) or emigrees from different locales who were forced to migrate from their diverse communities and comply with their communities’ decline.

The letter to my mother is followed by the last letter of the book, addressed to the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani, whose novella Returning to Haifa transmitted to me another bit of anti- or non-Zionist memory. Such a memory, that Hebrew literature written in the Zionist colony buried, led me to invent a fictional character, the daughter of one of the main characters in Kanafani’s novella, who resists her father’s interiorisation of the colonial command to forget who he was and to force his daughter to become ignorant of her Palestinian ancestors. Our encounter – between myself and this fictional daughter – through which we discussed our shared resistance to the way our fathers were trained to be the agents of such ruptures, concerned a third figure, a sorcerer named Sycorax, whose Algerian origins are denigrated by Shakespeare and denied by the readers of his play The Tempest. Sorcery is both our shared heritage and what allows us to reclaim our shared world in languages whose grammar is and must be foreign to imperial ones.

AD:    Your book engages generations of family, intellectual and political history that have passed through the extreme violence of colonial and imperialist world-making. Do you see differences in how these generations have developed anti-colonial consciousness?

AAA:    Instead of accepting as given what is called a ‘generational break,’ within some of the letters – like, for example, the one to my father or my great-grandmother Marianne – I try to track down the campaign of violence behind its creation. At the same time, I try to find moments that are revelatory of its failure to fully succeed. This organised campaign of violence detaches children from their milieux and their ancestral worlds, disrupts the transmission of ancestral languages, delegitimises sites of learning like the guilds or the fields and depicts them as backward and conservative with the aim of replacing them with public or Republican education, and outlaws the extended family where children used to grow up with several parental figures and outside of the dictates of the nuclear heterosexual family formation.

The goal of this campaign of forced assimilation is not only to destroy local and indigenous cultures but also to impoverish their members materially and spiritually such that they become dependent on and subservient to the formations and institutions imposed upon them. All of this is done in the hope of seeing indigenous modes of life vanish from one generation to the next. It is only if we forget how this generational gap was created that we can describe the decline in anticolonial behaviours and awareness in progressive terms over generations. When second and third generation children no longer speak their ancestors’ languages and are educated in schools established by the colonisers, and are socialised to cherish public education and be oblivious to the colonial violence against their ancestors whose learning formations were destroyed, we can be misled to describe this as a decline in anticolonial consciousness, instead of as another campaign of violence coupled with a crafted amnesia sponsored by the colonial state. However, this kind of amnesia is necessarily only partial, since the second and third generations experience the imprints of this campaign of violence that contributes to the generational break in their bodies, even if they do not know how to give it words.

While ancestors sometimes failed to transmit the details of what they suffered from, some anticolonial gestures are nonetheless transmitted. These are the gaps that my letters are attentive to and try to depict by braiding embodied memories. This is extremely important since the imperial and colonial narratives that we consume often depict the destruction of our ancestral worlds as what our ancestors actually wanted. Much of my letter to Julie, my other great-grandmother, is about this. It is a letter I didn’t anticipate writing as I knew nothing about her. But my curiosity deepened as I stumbled upon some laconic lines in the colonial documents of her son Joseph, my grandfather, who was probably called Yussouf by his mother. They revealed that he enjoyed an anticolonial education, one which I was deprived of and which I became determined to reclaim.

Contrary to common historiographical narratives on the patriotism of Algerian Jews, which suggest that from the moment they became French citizens they were patriots and happy to join the French army in the First World War, I read in the military records of my grandfather that he disappeared for four months attempting to escape enlistment into the army. This was a decision that was nurtured in the household of Julie, who was a single mother. When he did show up, he was punished with four months in prison. His mother’s involvement in liberating him from the army soon after also left traces in those documents. My grandfather died too young to transmit these anticolonial lessons to my father. If my father did receive some anticolonial education, he didn’t transmit it to me except implicitly through his hate for the state. While his ancestors hated the French colonial state, he happened to hate the Zionist state, not because it was Zionist – he was not anti-Zionist like me – but because it was the same type of colonial state his parents hated. In other words, he bore an inherited hatred that manifested in different forms, though he never knew how to translate it to a verbal lesson.

While I had no doubt theoretically that anticolonial sentiment and patterns of resistance cannot be totally eradicated, I was surprised by the extent of proof I managed to find in my own family history. From the moment I looked beyond my parents, who didn’t transmit an anticolonial consciousness to me except in muted and gestural ways, I found plenty of it in my broader family history, meaning that my parents’ ignorance didn’t block the transmission forever.

AD:    Part of the power of the letters is the outcome not just of your respect and love for your addressees, but also a certain probing of their work or stance. To put it plainly, you ask them difficult questions and, in some cases (or in all cases?), you expose blind spots, elisions, omissions, or even political faults in their positions. Your letters mount a critique. And I felt at times that this critique could only be mounted through the letter-form, through a more open enquiry, because it is perhaps impossible to not be angry in our historical juncture, and we need to scream that something, some kind of intellectual inheritance, has not been enough. Is this correct? Is there a political obligation today to return to certain ideas as critically as possible?  

AAA:    There are several explanations I can give in retrospect about my choice of the letter, but one thing I knew when I started writing was that I didn’t want to critique my addressees as we do in academic texts. In other words, I did not want to turn their work into my object of study in the realm of texts and arguments, as if their texts are not entangled with the lived experiences out of which they were written and out of which we continue to discuss them. Sharing anticoloniality as a common ground between myself and my addressee means refusing to treat their texts as dead letters.

I can illustrate this with one moment in my letter to Hannah Arendt, where I discuss Arendt’s approach to the reinstitution of French citizenship to Algerian Jews. In 1943, when the Vichy regime was officially defeated in Algeria, but Jewish men, including my father, were still held in forced labour camps with the consent of the Allies who were already there, Arendt was one of the advocates for the reinstitution of citizenship to the Jews there. Given my opposition to the Crémieux Decree, which in 1870 imposed this citizenship on the Jews, engaging with Arendt was not about criticising her for taking this position but about turning the question to myself to consider what I would have done in 1943, when the restitution of this citizenship could have saved lives. The letter allows me to consider this question not only in terms of an intellectual response – ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – but in terms of how the citizenship at the root of the question, and the regime which was to provide it, can be conceived and reconfigured without losing sight of the anticolonial horizon. Dwelling with Arendt in this moment, wherein she acts as a semi-civil rights lawyer, allows me to listen differently and understand different aspects of her work – like, for example, how her commitment to undo the French liberal attack on polygamy was part of her argument about citizenship, insofar as she saw the attack, like she saw citizenship, as a means of justifying the economic exploitation of women and their expropriation from fabrics of social protection within extended families. Her insight on the matter of polygamy provoked some fragments of memories I forgot I possessed, memories related to the unruliness of Muslim Jewish family affairs under the colonial rule that were buried under the liberal colonial notion of polygamy.

The most important thing that the letters summon is a space where it becomes obvious that we – our kin, elected kin, and us – can still think with each other and thus undo the imperial commands that relegate our ancestors to the past and us to the present. In this multigenerational epistolary space, the imperial call to partake in shaping the future is felt like hubris of those who can turn their back to the wound and tears in need of repair.

AD:    Which of the letters did you find most challenging to write, and why?

AAA:   The one to Franz Fanon. First, because he is a hero to many militant groups (although Jews are not recognised as one of them), and second, because I address him to tell him that he wronged us, Muslim Jews. It was a challenge to parlay that my uncompromising critique on this point emerged out of love, an anticolonial love. My hope is that this comes through. Like many others, I learned so much from Fanon, and it may be the proximity I felt toward him that urged me to tell him what I think no one, not even his two Jewish assistants, told him – that we Algerian Jews were not European Jews! Relating to Algerian Jews that way, Fanon actually repeated the colonisers' language, referring to us by what they commanded us to be; and by that, he accepted the colonisers’ power to fabricate the reality they desired.

When I read the biography of Fanon written by Alice Cherki, a colleague of Fanon at the Blida clinic, I was struck by the similarity between Fanon’s military trajectory and that of my father’s. Both were colonised subjects of France, who despite the voice of the elders in their communities who told them not to join the Africa army, decided to volunteer, and both fought in the same battles in Italy, Germany and France. I could not avoid thinking how different our lives could have been if Fanon were to have opposed the removal of the Jews from the chronicles of the colonisation. Raising such a question is not to put blame on Fanon, but to make his texts relevant for us today, relevant to our struggle as diverse Jews who seek to free ourselves from our ancestors’ colonisation by Euro-Zionists and from the amnesia surrounding our belonging to a Jewish Muslim world.

AD:    In your letter to Frantz Fanon, you weave together a formidable range of personal/familial and historical references. You weave in your father's story, his suffering and journeys, as if it were impossible for him to find a place in a world violently made by destroying the precolonial landscape in Algeria. You weave in, later on, the history of rape as a concrete part of the colonial process. You address Fanon and his decolonial and anticolonial imaginary, demonstrating that even this imaginary was not altogether free from the cunning of the colonial process and its ideological articulation. Above all, in my view, you illuminate the tricks and cunning of this process, especially in the way it used 'citizenship' (access to 'precious' French citizenship, in particular) to erode even memories of what was lost: a world of co-existence in which Algerian Jews had a place – and a material culture. You conclude by asking how, in having evaded these omissions, Fanon might have provided a far more expanded anticolonial imaginary. My question is: was Fanon perhaps too close to the catastrophe to see what you are revealing from your distance in time? In other words, are you here questioning the approach that says that being part of a moment in history affords the most emancipatory perspective? Can certain parameters of the colonial process be revealed from a temporal distance?

AAA:    I didn’t think about it that way, so I cannot say I was questioning this perspective. I would rather reject the axis of temporal progress altogether and approach the question of Fanon’s blind spots from a more modest assumption: none of us can have a fully liberated perspective on a world that is imperially shaped as long as the world is not decolonised. This is the meaning of the slogan ‘no one is free until everyone is free’.

If Fanon was not as influential on our decolonial imaginaries, and if the outcome of turning the Algerian Jews into Europeans were not a global phenomenon that involved the transfer of the Jews from the Jewish Muslim world to the West and their subsumption under an invented history known as the Judeo-Christian tradition, Fanon’s oversight could have remained anecdotal. But such was not the case, and so his oversights, which mirror the broader historical trajectory of Algerian Jews, have to be redressed in order to avoid their automatic reproduction by many. Most are largely ignorant of the fact that we Algerian Jews were colonised and, through the imposition of both citizenship and a state, robbed of our project to liberate ourselves from our colonisers, Europeans and Euro-Zionists.

But there is another aspect that intrigues me in relation to Fanon’s oversight in particular: the fact that as a Martiniquais, he was also colonised and naturalised by the French, yet he didn’t resist as a colonised subject of France but as an ally to the Algerians, lending his voice to their anti-colonial struggle. Why couldn’t he speak as a colonised subject in his own right? By understanding this parallel between his negligence of his own colonial subjection and that of Algerian Jews, I ask Fanon about the colonial act of conferring French citizenship, an act which enabled those who first colonised us through sheer violence to tie our tongues when they colonised us a second time with citizenship. The dramatic irony behind this history is that no one really saw Algerian Jews as Europeans, but this known lie had to be maintained since the real aims of this colonisation-through-citizenship were to expropriate our ancestors – us – from who they were/are (ie Muslim Jews) and to attack their ‘ontological resistance’, to use Fanon’s term.     

AD:    I saw the book as a complex testimony about the Jewish Muslim world. The testimony of material culture, of personal yet political histories, and also of the photographs that are embedded in this extraordinarily affective narrative you have made out of diverse fields, snippets of history, passionate questions. What is the role of photographs in the book?

AAA:    I didn’t plan how I would deal with photography, it simply happened that I practised an anticolonial mode of engaging with photographs. Many of them were actually taken as part of an imperial plunder, and so I had to reclaim them, transform them, invent them and make them mine. Operating under the persuasion that among those many Algerian women, whose photographs were taken in their millions under the colonial regime, were some of my female ancestors made it easier to see them beyond the colonial setting. That it could have been the photographer who had made some of them wear some of their jewels and face the camera didn’t change the fact that they were there, looking at me, telling me things I didn’t know, showing me their jewels, the jewels that were crafted with a know-how that was guarded by my ancestors for centuries. Through my interactions with them, the photos ceased to be only photos; they became objects and photographs all over again, unsettling the way the museum fashions those ontological distinctions and expects us to abide by them.

Where are my ancestors? Colonial postcards in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s personal collection

A jewel found in a colonial document: the name of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s grandmother, photo courtesy of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

There is a famous series of portraits of Algerian women taken in the concentration camps they were forced to live in after the French destroyed their villages. The women were also forced to disclose their faces, so that the colonial soldier could seize their likeness for the military surveillance system. When I looked at these portraits of violence and asked myself, ‘what did the women do when they were asked to unveil their faces?’ the answer became clear: they came with all their metal jewellery to keep them company, to protect them, and to turn the evil eye back on those who looked at them. When I started to crop the images and make their jewels the centre of the frames, I realised that these women were also involved in shaping their jewels by adding pendentives or sewing together some broken parts, etc. In the last two images I mentioned, engaging in an anticolonial mode also provided an opportunity to disquiet the status and glory of the white male photographers whose names became the names by which these women and the jewellery are known, as if their existence is reducible to this colonial mediation.

             
Protective jewels, cropped photographs from Marc Garanger’s series Femmes Algériennes, 1960, courtesy of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

AD:    As it is truly impossible to address in an interview the richness in detail but also the numerous routes the book opens – the book truly is a potential yet necessary history but also one that has already existed and been suppressed – I want to ask how you balanced the complex temporality the book enacts: the connection with what has actually existed but been destroyed with the hopeful anticipation that excavating this past will make possible a future that heals, that reinstates, that could be called, in the present circumstances of genocide, utopian? 

AAA:    I want to return to the semi-collective aspect of the writing that you noticed earlier and use it to say something about the question of temporality. I published a few earlier (and quite immature) versions of some of the letters, and, in a surprising way, dozens of Algerians reached out to me and entered these epistolary spaces in different ways. Two of them became the addressees of two letters included in the book – the poet Samira Negrouche and the historian Hosni Kitouni. Without these unexpected exchanges with so many Maghrebi interlocutors – they sent me photos of jewels, recipes, their ancestors’ memories of Jewish neighbours, researched information, and more – I would have continued to write about the Jewish Muslim world without really experiencing it, and inhabiting it would have remained a dream to follow the book. It was after two or three years of writing that I realised – and found the courage to say – that we are actually inhabiting this place despite the loss of a shared geography. When I finished my research on the destruction of the craftsperson in Algiers, and my muscular memory of making jewellery was quite awakened (although I am not a jeweller, I nonetheless reproduce jewels my ancestors used to make), I decided to host workshops of narration and fabrication with participants from the different parts of the Maghrebi diaspora. This enhanced the experience of inhabiting the Jewish Muslim world in the present, as through these workshops we came to realise how much of what we remember makes more sense when shared.

‘Jewelry’s resistance – Narration and Fabrication’ workshop, photo courtesy of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World is published by Verso, 2024, ISBN 9781804293119 (paperback), ISBN 9781804293126 (ebook)

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a film essayist, curator, and theorist of photography and visual culture, working from an anti-imperialist perspective. Her books include Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (2011). Her films include Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliance, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). She is a Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Angela Dimitrakaki is a writer and art historian. She serves on the Editorial Board of Third Text.