Houria is a writer and activist of Algerian origin, was a founder and former member of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), a decolonial political party based in France. She creates incendiary, polemical writing often delivered in a direct, poetic and passionate tone.

Speaking from the position of North African indigeneity, Houria critiques Modernity as a European settler colonial project founded on ideas of the virile, capitalist, imperialist ‘Man’. She diagnoses humanism and the Western monopoly of ethics as the antibodies of the colonial immune system—modernity’s way of recognizing foreign bodies, and distinguishing between self and non-self to activate defense measures. She pulls apart the false logic of integration, representation or inclusion: how North African and Arab-Berber-Muslim sociality is insoluble within white and Christian identity that aims to make them just like everyone else. In her writing she unpicks the European violence that created the settler-colonial state of Israel: to solve the white world’s moral legitimacy crisis, outsource European racism, and finally to be the weaponized wing of Western imperialism in the Arab world. In the face of this multidimensional violence produced by states and the ethics they impose, Houria proposes the practicing of revolutionary love.

This is where the question of the great WE will be raised. The We of our encounter, the We of the surpassing of race and its abolition, the We of a new political identity that we will have to invent together, the We of a decolonizing majority. The We of the diversity of our beliefs, our convictions, and our identities, the We of their complementarity and their irreducibility. The We of this peace that we will have earned because of the high price it cost us. The We of a politics of love, which will never be a politics of the heart. For to produce this love, there is no need to love or feel sorry for one-self. One will have only to recognize the other and embody that moment “right before hatred” to push it back as much as possible and, with the energy of despair, to dispel the worse. This will be the We of revolutionary love.

Whites, Jews and Us, Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love, 2016

Join Houria Bouteldja at the Towards Nakba as a Planetary Process assembly with Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Françoise Vergès & Amirah Silmi on Sunday 17th November.