Potential history : unlearning imperialism
Ariella Azoulay (Author)
"In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar of political theory and photography 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 imperial modes of ordering time, space, and politics. Like a camera's shutter slicing moments into photgraphs that can be catalogued and hung on museaum walls, imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, celebrating the new while destroying the old. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay proposes that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds by disengaging from its ways of knowing: slavery can only stop with reparations; the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 can only be halted with their unconditional return to Palestine. Including over one hundred images, Potential History argues that it is by caring collectively for our shared world that we can make the potential for freedom visible." -- Publisher, page four of cover
Print Book, English, 2019
Verso, London, 2019