In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites the audience to stay at the threshold of the museum in order to recognize the impossibility of decolonising museums without decolonising the world. Refusing to study what was plundered as simply objects as the museums commands us to do, but rather as evidence of destroyed world, Azoulay decenters the category of ‘restitution,’ and proposes to understand plunder as communal remains. Azoulay weaves the plunder of objects stolen from Jews in Europe – and their partial restitution within the broader picture of European plunder from other places, among them from the world of her ancestors in the Maghreb, from Palestine, and West Africa, in an attempt to undo the exceptionalization of “the Jews” which continues to serve Euro-American’ imperial interests on a global scale.
About the Speaker:
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, and a film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Her books include: The Jewelers of the Ummah – Algerian Letters (Verso 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Among her films: Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Among her exhibitions: “Errata” (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and “Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order” (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016).
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies