A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share
Ariela Aïsha Azoulay is a professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture, and Media at Brown University, as well as a curator and documentary filmmaker. Her many books include The Civil Contract of Photography and Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, and she has curated exhibits for galleries and museums around the world.
Ariella Azoulay takes on the seemingly impossible task of teaching
us how to unlearn: unlearning imperialism, unlearning the archive,
unlearning our complicity with regimes of violence, domination and
exploitation, and most importantly for this ambitious volume,
unlearning photography and its capacity to foreclose 'potential
histories' that must urgently be realized and reclaimed. The
monumental implications of unlearning are revealed with dizzying
effect through her rigorous analysis, lucid writing, and vivid
examples. In Potential History, she once again delivers a work of
breathtaking scope that challenges us to reconfigure both what
constitutes history, as well as what it means to learn from and
unlearn toward its radical potential for living otherwise.
*Tina Campt, author of Listening to Images*
A magisterial call to reorient our relations to objects, archives,
art, and plunder.
*Protocols*
A remarkably rich and evocative history on the problem of violence
and the importance of engaging aesthetics.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Azoulay has produced a unique handbook for the 2020s that details
how, why, when and where to say no in the affirmative. Her greatest
achievement is that, against the foreshortened horizons of a
despoiling barbarism, she makes all our tomorrows thinkable.
*Third Text*
Offers revitalising approaches to imperialism and to photography as
a cultural phenomenon, grounded in the re-cognition of the figures
'leaning against the edge' of photographs.
*review31*
Azoulay has produced a unique handbook for the 2020s that details
how, why, when and where to say no in the affirmative. Her greatest
achievement is that, against the foreshortened horizons of a
despoiling barbarism, she makes all our tomorrows thinkable.
*Notes From a Fruitstore*
Across some six-hundred pages, Azoulay accomplishes that rare thing
wherein her call becomes more urgent and acutely resonant even as
the contours and magnitude become less perceivable and more
outsized.3 By the book's end, she has thoroughly denaturalized the
terms of political classification and made the claim for a worldly
sovereignty beyond the nation-state.
*InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture*
By creating a "potential history," Azoulay questions the
imperialist construction of time, space, and politics through
objects and experiences of struggles around the world, from the
original peoples in the Americas, to the Congo under King Leopold
II.
*The Architect's Newspaper*
A political call to arms that argues the need for critical
examination of archive material...provocative and stimulating.
*The Prisma*
Much of Potential History's 500 pages bear particular relevance to
this moment of racial reckoning and faltering of neoliberal
capitalism. As mass movements mobilize in the streets against
anti-Black police brutality, white supremacy, and systemic,
structural racism, her call for reconceptualizing "the strike" to
include historians, artists, photographers, museum workers, and
"the governed" seems poignant.
*Hyperallergic*
To acknowledge the violence inherently embedded in
archives-particularly in cultural archives that the neutral we
understand as our cultural commons-and to then envision new ways of
being with these cultural objects so as to allow them to speak
their own futures are essential components of [Azoulay's] urgent
project of unlearning imperialism.
*World Records Journal*
Building from Azoulay's argument that our actually existing
commons-whether they are water systems or cultural archives-are
constituted by imperial violence, we should ask how to transform
imperial public spheres and institutions into worldly spaces of
care and interdependence.
*World Records*
To acknowledge the violence inherently embedded in
archives-particularly in cultural archives that the neutral we
understand as our cultural commons-and to then envision new ways of
being with these cultural objects so as to allow them to speak
their own futures are essential components of [Azoulay's] urgent
project of unlearning imperialism.
*World Records*
A codependent politics of appearance.manifests as superficial
investment in others' problems, often to satisfy the emotional
needs of the voyeur. This mode of despotic empathy has displaced
the sharing of a world-in-common-precisely what, in Ariella Aïsha
Azoulay's wording 'was destroyed and should be restored'-with
ubiquitous spectacles of privation and racialized violence.
*World Records*
According to Azoulay, an initial problem with unlearning
imperialism is that for most of us, our thinking and acting-indeed,
our very being-in-theworld-is conditioned by imperialism.
Unlearning imperialism is a paradoxical task because we must first
learn how imperialism works by rendering its working explicit so
that we might unlearn it.
*Contemporary Political Theory*
The book reads as though it were composed by Walter Benjamin's
"Angel of History," who backs, horrified into the future while in
front of him the ruins pile up. The angel, in this case, is the
citizen, forced into the position of a perpetrator and trying to
unwind history, to undo it not to return to a "golden age," but to
do away with traditional chronological thinking altogether.
*Political Theology*
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