Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Overview

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.

Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.

By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.

Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788735711
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	11/19/2019
Pages:	656
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ariela Aïsha Azoulay is a professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture, and Media at Brown University, as well as a curator and documentary film maker. 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments x

Preface xiii

1 Unlearning Imperialism 1

The Shutter: Well-Documented Objects / Undocumented People 1

Aïsha 13

Unlearning the New, With Companions 15

A Nonprogressive Study 20

1492: Marker of Reversibility 22

The Human Condition-A Political Ontology 30

The Differential Principle 34

Learning to Rewind 38

Archival Technology 40

Potential History 43

Sovereignty-A Form of Political Engineering 45

Citizen-Perpetrators 49

Regime-Made Disaster 51

Performing Rights 54

2 Plunder, Objects, Art, Rights 58

Transcendental Imperial Art 58

Potential History of Art 63

Intergenerational and Intercommunal Transmission 66

Imperial Temporality 75

Collecting 79

An Imperial Conjuncture 82

The Persistence of Homo Faber 89

Salvaged Art, Destroyed Infrastructures 93

The Harlem Renaissance Was No Exception 97

Art Destroys the Common World 100

The Rise of the Imperial Persona of the Artist 105

The Congo Condition 112

Léopold II's "Gift" 118

"Kill me if you wish" and "Don't shoot" 122

"Do you want to kill Me? Here I am" 126

The Universal Rights of Privileged Citizens 129

The Universal Position of the Artist 133

The Art of Not Displaying Everything Everywhere 135

Worldly Rights 140

Free Renty-Reverse Photography's Imperial Basis 146

Our Violent Commons 148

Unruly Objects 154

Imagine Going on Strike: Museum Workers 157

3 Archives: The Commons, Not the Past 162

Time Lines 167

To Institute, to Violate 169

The Archival Regime of Classification 171

Where and Who Are the Archive's Laborers? 178

Not the Past, but the Commons 185

The Pitfalls of the "Alternative" Approach 188

The Archive Is People 190

Archival Procedures 193

Nonimperial Grammar, Not Alternative Histories 195

Not Predecessors but Rather Present Actors 197

Archival Acceptability 200

An Unshowable Photograph 205

With My Companion at the Entrance of the Archive 210

Looting Documents 211

The Archon's Seduction and the Scholar's Desire 220

Refusing the Past 223

People's Experience and the Imperial Archive 229

When a Sentry Asks What Exactly Am I Doing and Why? 231

Unruly Photographs 235

Recoding Photographic Data: Mass Rape in Berlin, 1945 236

No Silences in the Archive: Mass Rape and World War II 248

The Infiltrator Doesn't Exist: Palestine, 1948 264

The Commons Is Never Irremediably Lost: Jaffa Street, Jerusalem 276

Imagine Going on Strike: Photographers 281

4 Potential History: Not with the Master's Tools, Not with Tools at All 286

The Matrix of History 287

How to Exit and How Not to Enter 295

Not with the Master's Tools 297

The Fabricated Phenomenal Field 301

The Homes of the Rightless 303

No New Beginnings 306

Meanings Cannot Be Ruled 311

Not Everything Is Possible 314

The Tradition of What Is and What Can Be 320

The Disciplinary Divide and the Problem of Meaning 324

The General Strike 327

The Separation of History from Politics 337

The Fabricated Meaning of Emancipation 342

Those for Whom Emancipation Did Not Appear 344

Four Types of Displacement 349

The Impending Storm 355

Disabling the Master's Tools: Regime-Made Disaster 359

Visibility 362

Tools 363

Temporality 363

Form of occurrence 364

Range of expansion 364

Target population 365

Representation 365

"Solutions" and aid to victims 366

Photography as the Practice of Human Relations 366

The Untaken, the Inaccessible, the Unshowable 370

Imagine Going on Strike: Historians 375

5 Worldly Sovereignty 380

Rehearsals With Others 383

Rehearsal 1 Democracy is not a regime apart 389

Rehearsal 2 Sovereignty is irreducible to the sovereign 391

Rehearsal 3 Incommensurable experiences 392

Rehearsal 4 Undoing sovereignty's oneness 396

Rehearsal 5 Unlearning sovereign revolutions 399

Rehearsal 6 A citizen in a theater of types 403

Rehearsal 7 Differential taxes and self-government 405

Rehearsal 8 The sole model and individual visionaries 409

Rehearsal 9 Nonimperial worldly sovereignty 415

Theses on the Contest Between the Two Formations of Sovereignty 417

Thesis 1 A theater is the actors, not the stage 418

Thesis 2 Differential sovereignty requires double inaugural acts 422

Thesis 3 Citizens' complicity must be extracted 425

Thesis 4 Sovereignty is not a gift 433

Thesis 5 Differential sovereignty seeks to murder worldly sovereignty 437

Thesis 6 Worldly sovereignty can always be reclaimed 442

Imagine Going on Strike: The Governed 444

6 Human Rights 448

Preamble 450

Textual Rights 451

Imperial Rights 451

Disabled Rights 452

Right to Destroy 456

Provisions, not Reparations 460

The Right to Impose a New Beginning 463

Undoing the "Cold War" Opposition 467

The Destruction of Palestine and Celebratory Narratives of Human Rights 474

The Right to Displace 479

Visual Literacy in Human Rights 483

The Curriculum of Human Rights 489

Lesson 1 The need for a new world order 490

Lesson 2 Art is universal 495

Lesson 3 Learning to bear witness 498

Lesson 4 Perpetrators vs. liberators 501

Lesson 5 Modernization 502

Lesson 6 Learning not to see 506

Lesson 7 The proper distance from violence 509

Lesson 8 The right to provide protection 512

Lesson 9 Visible victims 513

Where Are the Perpetrators? 515

Rights as a Worldly Relation among People 522

The Right Not to Be a Perpetrator 524

Rights, Anew 526

Imagine Going on Strike Until Our World is Repaired 530

7 Repair, Reparations, Return: The Condition of Worldliness 538

Inherited Archival Procedures 543

The Invention of the Document 551

Unlearning Documents 554

No History at All 557

What Are Reparations? 565

Counter to History 567

The Labor of Forgiveness 571

Forgiveness: The Literacy of the Unforgivable 573

Bibliography 582

Visual Sources 624

Index 628

Editorial Reviews

A remarkably rich and evocative history on the problem of violence and the importance of engaging aesthetics.”
—Brad Evans, 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.”
—Guy Mannes-Abbott, Third Text

“Compelling … As in her previous work, the tools Azoulay proposes are powerful precisely because of the way they implicate the faculty of imagination as a challenge to seemingly incontrovertible histories.”
—Ian Wallace, Artforum

“An important read on the topic of museums, colonialism, and their clear relationship.”
—Hrag Vartanian, Hyperallergic

“Potential History is not only about the past, but about the enormous possibilities of the present.”
—Sabrina Alli, Guernica

“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

“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.”
—Louis Rogers, 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.”
—Guy Mannes-Abbott, 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.”
—Luke Urbain, University of Wisconsin-Madison, InVisible 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.”
—Sean Sheehan, 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.”
—Stephen Sheehi, 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.”
—Rachel Stevens, 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.”
—Kareem Estefan, World Records Journal

“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.”
—Irmgard Emmelhainz, World Records Journal

“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.”
—Corey McCall, 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.”
—Margaret Olin, Political Theology

From the Publisher