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Abstract
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, offers a rethinking of violence and modernity that presents collaborative, reparative forms of world building as the only viable means of resisting and overcoming the ravages of imperialism. The book is at once a reckoning with empire, a semiautobiographical theorization of complicity, and a magnificent analytic exposé of imperial technologies of knowing, including photography, art, archives and museums, history, sovereignty, and human rights.
Notes
1 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): pp. 387–409, https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240. On the politics of this and other, related canonizations, see Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, “Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies,” Jadaliyya, 14 January 2016, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32857.
2 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (New York: Verso Books, 2019), p. 34.
3 Azoulay’s coinage, used throughout the book.
4 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 25.
5 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 8.
6 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 2.
7 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 284.
8 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 31 (emphasis in the original).
9 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 547.
10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), p. 95.
11 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 186.
12 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 288.
13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
14 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): pp. 257–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
15 Azoulay, Potential History, p. xiii.
16 Ariella Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (London: Pluto, 2011).
17 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 433.
18 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 383.
19 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 433.
20 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 566.
21 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 566.
22 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 571 (emphasis added).
23 Azoulay, Potential History, pp. 571–72.
24 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 148.
25 Moreover, are there other kinds of violence that are irreducible to empire? For example, is gender a similarly world-making regime of constitutive, differential violence (see, for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990])? What about subjectivity, or the emergence and formation of the subject itself (see, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1967]; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [New York: Vintage, 1994])?
26 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958) and On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1977).
27 See, for example, William Pietz, “The ‘Post-Colonialism’ of Cold War Discourse,” Social Text 19/20 (Autumn 1988): pp. 55–75, https://doi.org/10.2307/466178.
28 Azoulay uses this phrase throughout the book.
29 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 567.
30 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 573.
31 Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970). Arendt’s association of violence, embodiment, and Blackness are hallmarks of anti-Black racism and the “philosophical” means by which she rejects U.S. Black freedom struggles in this text as juvenile, ignorant, uneducable, and antipolitical. It is not a far journey from here to the characterizations of the 2020 summer’s Black Lives Matter uprisings as “looting” and “violent.”
32 Azoulay, Potential History, p. 170.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
C. Heike Schotten
C. Heike Schotten is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).