The Jewelers of the Oumma – Inhabiting the Jewish Muslim World

Catalog description

The independence of Algeria in 1962 marked the end of a centuries-old intertwined Jewish and Muslim world in North Africa and the Middle East. This end, however, is made into a non-event in the annals of history. We will study the colonial projects that produced this termination as a non-event, and will ask questions about the role of different imperial technologies such as art, museum, and archive in normalizing it. The Maghreb will be our point of departure, but students are invited to explore other imperial geographies and ask how practices of art-making such as jewelry, pottery, embroidery and others – not works of art destined to be displayed in museums –can resuscitate imaginaries of shared worlds?