The open letter as decolonial feminist method: observations and attempts

In this text, I reflect and expand on three questions that I was invited to submit to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay on occasion of the publication of her book The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World. In her book, Azoulay deploys the form of the open letter addressed to her actual and chosen kin, in an effort to revisit, examine, and repair the disruption of Jewish-Muslim life in the Maghreb and the Middle East by two interlaced colonial projects: the French rule of North Africa and the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Book launch organiser and chair Nondumiso Msimanga requested that questions be submitted in the form of open letters to Azoulay, to reflect the author’s own deployment of the open letter. By examining a range of experimentations with the epistolary form and specifically the open letter, and by writing open letters of my own that probe the intersections of Azoulay’s and my preoccupations, namely obstacles and allies in the act of creation, and a migrant feminist politics of refusal, I propose the open letter as a method with rich decolonial feminist potential.

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