Houria Bouteldja is a French-Algerian political activist, writer, and the author of Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, originally published in French in 2016 to much controversy. By “us,” Bouteldja means the indigènes de la République, the internally excluded sub-citizens of the Republic. The term indigène (translated as indigenous) invokes the colonial-era Code de l’indigénat, French legal codes establishing the inferior status of “natives.”

Although Bouteldja’s book emerges out of a specific French postcolonial context, its appeal to a decolonial politics is explicitly transnational, drawing on a network of thinkers and activists from Jean Genet to Audre Lorde, C. L. R. James to Chela Sandoval, James Baldwin to Sadri Khiari. This book forum on Whites, Jews, and Us opens with an introductory essay by Jared Sexton, and will be followed by essays by Yassir Morsi, Santiago Slabodsky, Joelle Marelli, Nazia Kazi, Joshua Dubler, Gil Anidjar, and Su’ad Abdul Khabeer over the summer.

This forum was guest curated by editorial board members Mayanthi Fernando and Vincent Lloyd.