Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

Abstract

volume of a brick, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism foregrounds and rejects structural, sustained imperialisms as the basis for a shared world and asks readers to begin the ongoing project of actively challenging imperialism's alleged inevitability. 1 Such a turn to history might seem strange to those attentive to the recent nostalgia politics around the globe or those who fear that unlearning imperialism means an annulment of its inventory of traumas.Just as much anti-and ante-imperialism, Azoulay is clear to distinguish her call from selective nostalgia or amnesia.Unlearning Imperialism means, instead, to reject a temporality that consigns violences to a remote past; to see resistance and contestation present at every step of imperialism's longue durée; and to amplify dormant potentialities crushed in imperialism's forward drive.Azoulay can be a challenging photographic theorist, largely because photographs for her are not strictly essential to the study of photography.This decoupling, which she outlined in her last book Civil Imagination,

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 160 citations exist upstream.