Potential History: Unlearning ImperialismA 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. |
Contents
Unlearning Imperialism | 1 |
Plunder Objects Art Rights ཋu3 | 58 |
MUSEUM WORKERS | 157 |
PHOTOGRAPHERS | 281 |
HISTORIANS | 375 |
Worldly Sovereignty | 380 |
Sovereignty | 417 |
Citizens complicity must be extracted | 425 |
Sovereignty is not a gift | 433 |
Worldly sovereignty can always be reclaimed | 442 |
Human Rights | 448 |
IMAGINE GOING ON STRIKE UNTIL OUR WORLD IS REPAIRED | 530 |
The Condition | 538 |
582 | |
Visual Sources | 623 |
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actions actors African Americans Allies already alternative histories archive Arendt artists Black Cambridge century Charlie Hebdo citizens citizenship claims colonial common concepts Congo constitutive continue cultural declared decolonization destroyed destruction differential rule differential sovereignty discourse dispossession documents enslaved example exist experts fabricated forced formations freedom French French Revolution governed Hannah Arendt historians human rights Ibid images Imagine imperial condition imperial powers imperial rights imperial shutters imperial violence imposed institutionalized institutions Israel Israeli Jewish Jews labor live looted material meaning modalities modes museums narratives nonimperial Olympe de Gouges ontology operation Palestine Palestinians past people's perpetrators plunder political regime potential history privileged progress protect rape recognize refugees refusal regime-made disaster reparations resistance Revolution role shared world slavery slaves sovereign tion University Press Unlearning victims violation W. E. B. Du Bois women World War II worldless worldly sovereignty writes York