Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Unlearning at the Threshold of the Museum

In this lecture, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites the audience to stay at the threshold of the museum in order to recognize the impossibility of decolonizing museums without decolonizing the world. Refusing to study what was plundered as mere objects as museums command us to do, but rather as evidence of a 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.