Middle East Studies

Film Screening and Discussion | Modern Culture and Media | The World like a Jewel in the Hand

Film Screening February 28 at 5:30 pm in True North at 280 Brook Street

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

5:30 - 7:30 p.m.

True North, Stephen Robert Hall, 28 Brook Street

About the Event
A film by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay followed by a conversation between Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Sherena Razek, and Adel Ben Bella

Directed by filmmaker and anticolonial scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The World Like a Jewel in the Hand is an experimental documentary that travels over open books, looted objects and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape, the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person, by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses the imperial histories of those places.

Films
Partner Events

Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. Substantial wealth was accumulated through the extraction of raw materials, labor, knowledge, and skills, including the "visual wealth" attained by putting people in front of the colonizers' cameras. This long and enduring ransack cannot be addressed through the discourse of restitution, especially when arguments are made in support of the restitution of individual objects; rather, it requires a questioning of the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within the wide landscape opened by this questioning, the World Like a Jewel in the Hand focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world that existed in North Africa. It insists on making it imaginable and inhabitable again.