Against Imperial Knowledges: Lisa Lowe and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in Conversation

When we first encountered Ariella Aïsha Azoulay and Lisa Lowe’s work, we were struck by the many resonances between them. Both explore the violent effects of colonial modernity across varied global and historical contexts, arguing that the exclusionary formation of the modern subject seeks to foreclose other past, present, and future modes of being. For both, colonial modernity entails violent material, ideological and temporal acts of containment, classification and division, which are still enacted by contemporary archives, museums and historical narratives. They demand an anti-colonial methodology which approaches the past through potential and possibility – what might have been, and what could still be. Discussing Azoulay’s work, Marianne Hirsch argues this is a ‘a deeply feminist approach’.¹ Yet, though both scholars discuss gender, they do not necessarily adopt the term ‘feminist’, suggesting it evokes a white, liberal form of feminist activism, which is implicated in colonial oppression. Despite – or rather, because of – this, we were excited to stage this conversation. For, rather than taking ‘decolonial feminism’ as a fixed concept, we consider this in terms of its potential as well as its history. To us, these thinkers’ work is thus important, not only embodying ‘decolonial feminisms’ as they are, but also gesturing towards what they could be.

A curator, filmmaker, writer and theorist, Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her work spans disciplines and genres, with publications including The Civil Contract of Photography (2008); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (2012); and Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (2019). Across her work, she insists on the intertwinement of the aesthetic and the political; photography becomes a material practice of, and metaphor for, modernity’s impulse to contain and capture. In contrast, Azoulay enacts a methodology that refuses imperialism’s terms, and produces a ‘potential history’ which ‘refuses to inhabit the position of a historian who arrives… after the violence was made into part of the sealed past, dissociated in time and space from where we are …’ and instead, ‘mak[es] repressed potentialities present again …’.² This shapes Azoulay’s approach to the varied photographs, texts and objects she works with, which become sites of potential, recalling and carrying alternative histories of belonging.

Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at the University of Yale. Publications include Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (1991); Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996); and The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015). Intimacies reads literary, visual and historical texts to analyse the formation of Enlightenment liberalism and, concurrently, colonial modernity, illustrating how liberal promises of freedom were predicated upon enslavement and colonisation. Where histories of empire sometimes reproduce its racialised classifications and categorizations, Lowe strategically traces sometimes-foreclosed ‘intimacies’ across geographies and groups, including the Asian and African diasporas. Throughout, she embraces thinking through ‘a past conditional temporality,’ tracing the possibilities foreclosed by liberal political reason and modernity. In so doing, she articulates and enacts the project of ‘imagining, mourning and reckoning “other humanities” within the received genealogy of “the human”’ (175).

This article forms part of the special issue of parallax, ‘Reading Otherwise: Decolonial Feminisms’. The issue features conversations which took place 2021-23. Prompts relating to the speakers’ work and the key terms of the issue were circulated ahead of this conversation. We started the conversation by asking what had brought them to their work.

Lisa Lowe: I’m happy to be invited to talk with you Ariella. Our projects are very differently situated, and we take up different moments and conjunctions, but, in the ways we’re thinking about time and history and the relationship of the past to the present, there are definitely some convergences and resonances. So, it’s delightful to be with you.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: I feel the same. Your book Intimacies was among the first I taught when I moved to the US and started to think about Palestine in the context of the long history of colonialism and imperialism. I returned to your book before our conversation and was struck by the many notes I wrote in the margins. As you say, our projects are different, but they intersect on different levels.

Lisa: I’ve been thinking about how your work has been concerned with the image, and in particular the photograph, as a modern imperial medium. In Potential History, you seem to be thinking about photography as both this material medium, but also as a kind of metaphor for the institutions of empire, in that the shutter ‘captures’ the colonised in both systems of representation and in imperial modes of social organisation, enclosure, and destruction. Your book brilliantly moves through the various institutional forms through which imperialism works, such as the museum, the university, the archive, sovereignty, and governance through human rights. I wonder how you consider the photograph, and if, in a sense, you would say it is as an aesthetic corollary of these imperial institutions?

Ariella: That’s a very intriguing question and I’m not sure if I have a straightforward answer. What I’m trying to get to in Potential History that I didn’t see earlier, is an understanding of photography as one imperial technology among others. So, while in a sense, photography follows on from other imperial technologies, it is not exactly a corollary since it is entangled with them, even before the invention of the device.

There is a kind of cliché that limits the impact on our sensorial-perceptual disposition to the fact that we are surrounded by so many photographs. I think that the deployment of technologies of expulsion or enslavement impacted our sensorial apparatus much more than the photographs that registered glimpses of their operation, and before the device that produced them was invented. So, I’m trying to avoid relating to photography only through the images it produces – commonly approached as representations – that are yielded through the operation of the shutter, and dwell on its operation. When photography was invented, its mere introduction to different places was facilitated by other imperial technologies that shaped the ways people could encounter each other.

Lisa: That’s very helpful indeed. In Potential History, the photograph seems to appear not exclusively in modernity. Even though it is a technology of modernity, and of course, you’ve written about it that way, it seems there are parts in the book where you’re thinking about the photograph more metaphorically, as an apparatus of conquest, enclosure, captivity, and so forth. There weren’t photographs in 1492, but it’s as if you’re reading it backwards and forwards.

Ariella: Yes, photographs are very important to me, but I’m also trying to think about photography separately from them, in order to understand it beyond its mission statement – producing images; that also means not thinking about photographs only as a ‘modern’ type of image in a long history of images. I’m trying to understand how this ‘writing with light’ project took shape as a technology of extraction, built on those other technologies that extracted lands, lives, knowledge, objects, resources etc. This allows us to see the invention of the device and the photographs as contingent on the technology that allows imperial agents to arrive somewhere where they do not belong and produce (visual) wealth out of the captive presence of people who were colonised. So, though we don’t have photographs taken in 1492, photography was already invented then.

Lisa: Exactly, I understand what you mean.

Ariella: We were invited to speak about how we came to this work. I would love to hear from you what drove you to study the ways imperialism unfolds from its broader structures to the most intimate folds?

Lisa: I have always been interested in migration and modernity, and the centrality of racialised immigrant labour to the growth of capitalism, colonialism and empire. I am also concerned with the question of the endurance and social reproduction of those racial colonial relations, and their durability in the present. My first book Critical Terrains examined gender and class in the French and British colonial discourses of Orientalism, and my second book Immigrant Acts focused on Asian immigration to the US and looked especially at the ways that the state racialises for capitalist development, through technologies of citizenship and immigration laws that produced non-citizen racialised labour, while also barring these workers from political belonging in the nation state. In the 1850s, Chinese workers, for example, were recruited to the western US to work in railroads and agriculture, many of whom were from the same groups that I study in the Intimacies of Four Continents. The Chinese were followed by subsequent immigrations from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and South Asia, only for them to be similarly excluded from US citizenship. In fact, Chinese and other Asians could not be naturalised into citizenship until the mid-twentieth century, making Asian immigrants in the US the first undocumented migrant labourers. Intimacies started with my curiosity about the relationship of this nineteenth-century global Asian migration to settler colonialism, slavery, and empire.

To answer your question about the relationship between the ‘intimacies’ of large-scale imperial operations and intersubjective or domestic ‘intimacies’, I became interested in the relationship of several kinds of ‘intimacies’ as I worked in archives. I came to see that there were, firstly, imperial connections between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, and secondly, a relationship between these imperial ‘intimacies’ and the production of ‘intimacies’ within the European domestic household. Not only were materials and commodities extracted from the colonies, but enslaved, colonised, and migrant workers provided the domestic labour that produced the conditions of possibility for British and European bourgeois colonial households. Finally, the sexual, intellectual and political relations among these different peoples working under imperialism constituted a third kind of ‘intimacy’.

I started seeing these connections as I examined the 1803 Secret Memorandum in which British colonial administrators described a plan to import workers from China to replace the enslaved Africans to increase sugar production in the West Indian plantations – and the project quickly expanded.³ I spent a decade going through archives and following all the different threads, and soon it became about many other things, and in particular about the violence of the colonial archive and how the archive itself is a medium of the empire. The documents on Anglo-American settler colonialism, slavery, and empire are often collected and archived separately, their archival separations disconnecting processes that were and are deeply related. By reading across different collections, I could observe the intertwined colonial relations of Indigenous dispossession, enslaved labour and Asian indenture that were the conditions of possibility for the emergence of nineteenth-century liberal ideas of citizenship, free labour, representative government and free trade in Europe. Liberal freedom linked the transatlantic world of plantation slavery to the expansion of colonial trades and brokered emigration in the Chinese treaty ports, which made possible the unprecedented imperial dominance of the British Empire by the end of the nineteenth century, and the succession of it by the United States in the twentieth. And furthermore, there were always persistent and ongoing collaborations across differently situated peoples, organising or rising spontaneously in anti-colonial rebellion.

I understand you as also being keenly interested in the archive as a colonial technology, both as a modality of colonial governance and as a medium of epistemological reproduction. In my thinking on this, I’ve learned from Ann Laura Stoler’s pioneering work as well as from Black feminist scholars like Hazel Carby, Saidiya Hartman, Stephanie Smallwood, Jennifer Morgan and others who have eloquently criticised the archive of colonial slavery. And you? What brought you to your work? And what were your influences as you were writing?

Ariella: First, I love your pristine definition of the raison d’être of that state – ‘the state racialises for capitalism’. It strikes me to hear that you worked on Intimacies for a decade. I also worked on Potential History for a decade. I don’t think that I could have written it in less time than that, and – allow me a digression – since the conditions for pursuing research in the neoliberal universities are under threat, I’m thinking about those top-down initiatives that aim to double our research output but expect us to do it in less time (alongside growing administrative work) and also to match our research to the categories they invent to appeal to donors. Coming back to why I needed a decade… I left the Zionist colony in Palestine named Israel, where I was born, with a manuscript that I thought was almost finished. Shortly after I arrived in the US, I was overwhelmed by the sense that it felt like a fast-forward movement of the imperial project in Palestine, and I could not stop playing these buttons in my mind – rewind, fast forward – thinking about similarities and differences, linear history and potential history. Just to give a brief example: I was struck by the way different people, including colleagues, spoke about democracy with reverence; spoke of its constitution and the ‘founding fathers’ and how they saw it, as if the constitution were not written by enslavers and as if those imperial democracies that we know were not shaped by imperial technologies of expulsion and enslavement that fabricate the differential body politic on which they are premised. Israel is such a democracy too, and being relatively young, the violence that enabled its emergence through the ruination of Palestine is too fresh to forget.

Lisa: Yes. As it is here in the US. But less explicitly.

Ariella: Yeah. It is less legible for people who are not the direct victims of those democracies, whose violence is constitutive of the regime, and that is why I describe the disaster they produce and reproduce as regime-made disaster. So when I arrived here it was as if I had arrived in the post-colony – the fast-forward movement of after slavery and the ethnic cleansing of the Americas. But on the other hand, as I came from Palestine, I also knew that this notion of ‘fast forward’ was misleading since imperial violence was not brought to a close, and it must rather be challenged with a rewind movement. A rewind movement is necessary for undoing the imperial temporality that dissects time, separates the tenses, and tells us what belongs to the past. This rewind movement is also necessary in order to create the urgency of abolition and repair, and resuscitate other modes of being together that liberal democracy destroyed and also relegated to the past. Having not grown up here in the US, I had to immerse myself in the study of the regime-made disasters of slavery and genocidal violence against Native Americans. My book is, in a way, a manifesto against history, so I avoided learning the history of slavery and genocide on this soil, and rather engaged in unlearning the way they were inscribed in museums, archives and history books.

So, while the potential history of Palestine was my initial focus, it actually became a potential history of 500 years of imperialism, with Palestine understood as part of the temporal and spatial expansion of a series of technologies. I was already studying Palestine in connection to the eighteenth century revolutions and the formation of imperial citizenship before I left the colony. But moving to the US allowed me to understand it also in the context of the incredible wealth plundered and acquired from colonised lands and the role they play in shaping those crimes as a past that we are invited to explore in museums and archives. With the help of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (2004) and Sylvia Wynter’s ‘1492: A New World View’ (1995) I was able to understand 1492 as a moment in time but also as a configuration of violence that occurs at different moments in different places. Thus, for example, the understanding that in Palestine 1492 is actually in 1948, or in Algeria it is 1830.

It is not a revisionist work that contends that things started earlier or later than we thought. It is an onto-epistemological shift that allowed me to argue that one of the strongest imperial technologies is the one that invents the past, and museums and archives operate as its sites of materialisation. Otherwise, you cannot understand, for example, how so many objects plundered from different places are shown publicly and under different critical discourses, and people are invited to see them as if they were works of art and not an element in a case for repair and reparations for centuries of ruination of cultures. Walter Benjamin’s notions of constituent violence and incompletion of the past were also my guides in this journey. ⁴

In this sense, the idea of potential history is organised around this anti-imperial temporality which does not understand 1492 as a moment in chronological time. Against this backdrop, the notion of ‘return’ is not what imperial technologies contend – you cannot return the arrow of time – but rather a return to pre-imperial formations based on the refusal to accept the law in which imperial violence is materialised as a fait accompli.

Lisa: That is fascinating. So, am I understanding correctly that you’re saying that you were not thinking of 1948 until you came to the US? Or perhaps coming to the US provided a different perspective on 1948?

Ariella: No. I did engage with 1948 when I was in Israel, mainly in the photographic archive that I created (From Palestine To Israel – A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formations 47-50), but I didn’t understand it as a reiteration of 1492. Being born in the Zionist colony and assigned ‘Israeli’ as an identity at birth, it took me a long time to unlearn this identity and to understand that we were born in human factories that programmed us not to see 1948 as the destruction of Palestine. Understanding that this identity was shaped to make the return impossible, I could not see another option other than refusing to recognise myself in it and unlearning the infra-structure that normalises it.

Lisa: Yes, I understand. Would you say that your move to the US – with its particular histories of colonialism, slavery, and empire – engendered a new reflection upon empire and imperial disavowal in Israel where you had lived and grown up? American exceptionalism performs a very particular form of nationalism that denies historical and ongoing settler colonial dispossessions, enslavement, and imperial wars.

I did also want to comment on how beautiful it is that you have adopted your father’s mother’s name. Is that the Aïsha? I mean, in a way, it’s a kind of instantiation of this living past that is not over; it’s a lovely sort of unclosed relation to the past.

Ariella: Yes, I embraced my grandmother’s name when my father passed away and I relate to it as the name that was denied to me, that my father concealed or felt he had to conceal when he arrived at the colony: the name of one of the prophet Muhammad’s wives. Retrieving it from a document that will probably not survive when my grandchildren deliberate on what to call their children, bringing this name back to the repertoire of possible names, is already a means of inhabiting the Jewish Muslim world that several colonial projects ruined.

‘Aïsha’ helped me to write Potential History and to reclaim ancestral knowledge and affiliation against the ‘new beginning’ that the nation state imposed while also assigning us histories that were not ours. When I finished Potential History, I felt I’d rehearsed enough: it was time to understand what it meant to refuse to be exiled from the Jewish Muslim world and reclaim my belonging to my ancestors, who on my paternal side lived in Algeria for centuries, and on my maternal side were expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century. This now preoccupies me in a series of open letters I’ve been writing since the day I finished writing Potential History.

Lisa: Might we talk about this topic of ‘history’ that you raise when you refer to your book as a ‘manifesto against history’? I believe I understand what you mean, but I wonder if we think about history in similar ways, or if we actually differ on how we each understand it. I take it as a given that there are multiple temporalities and that a linear time, or the developmental historical time of national narratives, is merely one of the constructions. But as Nick Estes writes in Our History is the Future (2019), and as you suggest when you evoke, ‘rewind, fast forward’, there is also a kind of time in which there’s simultaneity – in which the past isn’t past, it still infuses the ‘now’, and the future isn’t a projection in the future, it is already here in some way. In this way, imperial rule imposes a universal singular time upon the condition of multiple temporalities, and in the process, violently suppresses alternative worlds, alternative temporalities. Given a condition of multiple, simultaneous temporalities, the singular timeline of national or imperial narrative is never ‘neutral’ but works as a normative mode of discipline and governance.

I really appreciated in your discussion of ‘sovereignty’ your assertion that there are many different forms of subject and power that are suppressed by a normative notion of nation state sovereignty, for example. Likewise, we could consider time to be similar: there are dominant residual and emergent forms of time. So, if your book Potential History is a ‘manifesto against history’, I would understand that as meaning that it is a manifesto against what Benjamin would call ‘historicism’ – this linear time of the developmental progress of the nation. And then there is also what we might agree are counter-histories – the histories that insert another protagonist but leave the form of linear progressive temporality in place. Sometimes they verge on something quite different, but they too get drawn into, or coerced into, buttressing this national historical time.

But I also think there’s another kind of ‘history’, what I understand you to be elaborating with the idea of ‘potential history’. I wonder if you would agree that your book is a manifesto against historicism and universal history, but that, in exploring ‘potential history’, it gestures towards the simultaneous unruly histories of what exists all at once without being forcibly ordered or subordinated into material for a national past, present, and future? In other words, the reason I would want to rescue an idea of history, as what exists as material life, is that of course I don’t want to make it all discourse. There is history, just not history that we think of as historicism. What do you think of this?

Ariella: Indeed, we share some very solid assumptions about how different modalities of time were destroyed, or rather not destroyed, but put under severe danger.

Lisa: But still exist in certain ways. I mean, that’s what one of my projects is – to clear away the structures that make them illegible because they’re still there.

Ariella: Yes, affirming that what imperialism aimed to destroy persists, even in a damaged way, is necessary. This is, in a way, why I ‘edited’ my use of the adjective ‘destroyed’ to describe a variety of modalities of time and said instead that they are ‘severely threatened’. This is at the core of imperial temporality – marking its attempts to destroy as successful, thus turning invisible the ongoing struggles against those imposed formations.

In our work, these are not simple intellectual affinities, I think, but rather a shared commitment to accounting for the different formations of violence that are normalised in the most quotidian acts. Given our different biographies, origins and geo-cultural itineraries, these commitments could not yield similarities if those technologies against which we think and write were not also global and entangled with different institutions; construed as neutral and common to all cultures; were not imposed almost everywhere – citizenship, museums, archives, etc. Connecting the four continents, as you do in Intimacies, shows this brilliantly. I wonder if rescuing the idea of history, as you suggest, helps you to also conceive the reversibility of what these technologies violently imposed?

Lisa: I definitely appreciate the way that you are nuancing the importance of not granting imperial structures the power of total destruction, but calling for us to remain attuned to what it cannot destroy despite its will to do so. We are in agreement here. I should say that I’m not so concerned to ‘rescue’ an idea of history as to hold a place for the persistence of multiple entangled pasts in the present, whether we were to call that ‘history’ or to call it something else.

Ariella: Despite agreeing here, we are also led to engage differently with those questions by the objects we study and interact with. In considering these differences and similarities, I think of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, for instance – the subject of a chapter in Intimacies – and a photograph of a Palestinian refusing to be expelled in 1948 which I’m interacting with in my book. I’m looking at him kneeling, refusing to go, while he is surrounded by a few people – Zionists I’m assuming – who are trying to incentivise him to cross what they’ve decided is the border and to leave Palestine. He is refusing. I have been looking at him for many years, at his image that I kept on my desk. His drama of about-being-expelled provokes my refusal to be the scholar who studies him, to turn him into my object of research. His struggle, though it was repressed, is not over. This struggle persists and it is the same ever since – to return to Palestine. Acknowledging that there is no other struggle, we must be companions to avoid situating him in the past.

Lisa: Yes, I see your point. An anti-imperial practice must refuse to subordinate these living relationships as inert objects fixed in a ‘past’. This practice would unsettle that subject-object separation and hierarchy, to be companions in ongoing struggles that are still unfinished, and not pin and place them in nice cases under glass to be dispassionately observed. I often think about my work as being concerned to activate a conflict between the official given history and what that historical account attempts to mute or suppress.

Ariella: Yes. Photography was modelled on the same logic of inventing the past, and as a spectator or as a scholar I am supposed to look at this event as over. Roland Barthes would say the photograph is the site of death. But what we attend to in the photograph is not over. The struggle is here, present.

Lisa: This is very instructive, yes.

Ariella: And I don’t want to shape myself as the scholarly subject who can now understand their patterns of forced migration, their patterns of return. So it poses a very embodied concrete problem. It’s not only against ‘historicism’ as you said in relation to Benjamin; it is an understanding that there is a line here that I should not cross.

This is what I mean when I say that Potential History is a manifesto against history. And these engagements have different origins and take different forms. I would love to hear more about the emergence of what you call the ‘archive of colonial uncertainty’ and the way you transform their intentions into potentialities.

Lisa: Yes, it is an ethical problem, as well. That is, to connect our discussion with some of the questions Ruth and Maya posed about what it is to live critically now, I think part of living a critical life in the now may involve not studying the past as if it is ‘over’ and done, but to keep open that window between the past and the present and not shut it, not to be on one side, but to regard it as a living relation. In a sense, it is like mourning, in a way. That is, there is loss and there is death in the past, but it isn’t over. It’s a kind of active relationship, and the now is in active relation to it. If we try to resolve it in some way and stop that open, porous relationship, then we perform imperial subjectivity. So part of it is, as Avery Gordon would say, being hospitable to ghosts, and allowing that openness of simultaneous time to be part of what goes into how we act in the now.⁵ Does that resonate with what you’re saying?

Ariella: Yeah, completely.

Lisa: In the ‘Vanity Fair’ chapter in Intimacies, I was definitely treating it as a nineteenth-century text that I was studying to see the intimate operations of nineteenth-century liberalism and colonialism. But where I began, and where there’s something that resonates with what you’re saying, is that I did really resist – I’m sure you noticed this – the mandate to find the voices of the Chinese, or the voices of the enslaved, or the presence in these colonial archives, because, of course, they aren’t located in the colonial archives as dead objects, or imported cargo, but the relation is an enduring, living one. So that’s why it’s a reading of the colonial archive and the liberal archive, as opposed to, for example, an artefact like the photograph that you’re describing. And of course, I’m looking at the nineteenth century so it’s a more distant period. But I’m sensitive to what you’re saying. I think it’s very important.

Ariella: I’m not sure that in the case of the photograph, for example, I see it as an ‘ethical’ question, or maybe I’m trying to reverse it and recognise his presence. Instead of my ethical position, I recognise his presence and actions as what should set the terms. He is not dead in the archive. His resistance to being expelled is also his resistance to being an object of study and it entails my refusal to be the subject of empire, i.e. turning him into my object of study. It is another way to keep alive the non-imperial temporality of the it is not over.

Lisa, I wanted to hear about your complex relationship to objects, present all along the book, from raw material to lavishly produced ones. Your discussion of intimacy between four continents is built on documents, but it is in a way also guided by the presence of the objects in the living room, in the bedroom, in their worlds. I love the way that through the sensual and connoisseur type discussion of chintz in a living room, for instance, you take us directly into the manufacturing of cotton across continents; the use of law in protecting markets; class division and more – in a different way from what the document enables.

Lisa: Yes, I am very, very interested in material culture and objects. And, in a way, I see them as differently but similarly imbued with these colonial relations. I don’t only mean objects that have become objects of the museum, for example, but remains of many sorts. You probably know about the African burial ground that was unearthed beneath Manhattan in the 90s,⁶ or this recent episode of the MOVE bombing remains, right?⁷ These objects are inscribed with some of the same processes that colonial archives inscribe their documents. In other words, they’re subjected to the same forms of power and scrutiny: what I call the colonial division of humanity, in terms of who is considered human and who is disregarded as unhuman. Material objects speak differently because they’re not confined to language. There’s a way in which documents are more narrowly accessible and differently disciplined. I don’t think written documents are identical to material objects, and they ‘hold’ the past differently, but rather, I’m interested in many kinds of media and materials, and not simply archives and language.

Ariella: In the cartography that you are unfolding in Intimacies, it is not the documents that are moving; it’s everything else – the objects, the people, including also the movement of affects, the immaterial.

Lisa: And also in the immaterial. I think you’re exactly right… I’m not trying to establish new objects of study, or recover what truly happened, but to read intensively the absences – or what falls out – when you separate different regions, and different colonial departments, and to inquire into what our disciplinary forms of knowledge production leave out and make impossible. So, in a certain way, I’m trying to stage what it means to read across or read between, associate unlikely objects, times, texts, and operations, and to frame an approach that is alert to relation. A consideration of relation seeks an alternative to the presumption of discretely bounded units, and explores instead the interdependence, relatedness, and mutuality. So, yes, I think your question contains a very keen observation.

Ariella: You also have a moment in Intimacies when you speak about ‘unlikely archives’.⁸ In what you described just now you already define the archives that you’re working with as the ‘unlikely’ archives.

Lisa: I mean by ‘unlikely archives’, on the one hand, unofficial archives beyond those collected or endorsed by state institutions, and on the other hand, those repositories that may not even be considered by some to be an ‘archive’, per se, such as ephemera, bones or remains, or affective and embodied practices of daily life that include gestures, movement, dance, or song.

Ariella: In Potential History, I interact with objects as the site of rights and part of an environment of rights that connects people and objects. My point of departure is that plundered objects were part of worlds which imperialism sought to destroy. Rather than accepting the status the museum assigns to objects – discrete entities – I’m trying to foreground how people’s rights are inscribed in them. Histories and theories of rights associate rights with written documents such as bills, declarations, etc. and also recognise the stature of documents as defining the legal status of people. The category of the ‘undocumented’ emblematises this. Thinking about objects as sites of their rights, we can envisage those objects kept in empires’ museums as holding the rights of ‘the undocumented’.

Lisa: I would love to talk about the project that you just described because it’s very profound and moving and one of the things I have found very provocative in your work. I want to ask your thoughts about reparation and restitution, with all of the caveats that restitution is not enough if it’s simply giving back to the museums and celebrating masterpieces of work and so forth. When you talk about this I wonder if you mean by this the serious work of almost re-embedding, or restoring objects to their community of relation, even as we understand that full restoration is impossible. Even ‘in the wake’, to cite Christina Sharpe, of the devastation of many of those communities and conditions, can there be a kind of restoring of a form of object in relation?⁹ Is that what you are saying?

Ariella: Yes.

Lisa: I think that’s such a profound methodological proposition, but also one with deep political implications, including for reparations, or restitution, and actions that have been discussed as crucial to decolonisation. That is profound and something I really admire in your work.

Maya Caspari: Building on that, this might also be a good moment for us to ask you about how you understand your work in relation to this issue’s theme of ‘decolonial feminism(s)’. Though the intersections of gender, race and colonialism is important, your work is not explicitly or self-consciously ‘feminist’ in some of the ways this term – as a history of scholarship or activism – has conventionally been understood. We’re curious about how you see your relationship to a project of imagining ‘decolonial’ feminisms and what it means to you to be brought into dialogue with each other in this context?

Ariella: What made me feel a sense of discomfort in ‘feminism’ upfront are its progressive premises and histories, that didn’t question its entanglement with colonialism, imperialism and their emancipatory campaign of violence.

One thing about decolonial feminism: decolonial should not be understood as an adjective, but rather as a struggle. Otherwise, decolonial feminism would become another artefact in the museum, disentangled from other processes of decolonisation that unfold in different arenas, and that generate different feminisms. Nothing can be assumed to be decolonised before the entire world is decolonised.

Lisa: I would just add that I don’t name my commitment as primarily ‘feminist’ due to the normative genealogy of European and North American liberal feminism, which often affirms a universal notion of womanhood. Feminism still generally names a project in which the primary contradiction is presumed to be gender, and to my mind, gender cannot be separated from the contradictions of colonialism, race, empire, and capitalism. Yet while ‘feminist’ is not my primary identification, I’m obviously very concerned with gendered social reproduction, the gendered division of labour, and sexual violence under colonialism and militarism – and these are also concerns of feminist movements. But I don’t see a contradiction being concerned about social reproduction and gendered violence, yet not primarily identifying with ‘feminism’.

Ariella: I feel the same. And, if you hadn’t foregrounded this affinity between both of us, we would maybe not find ourselves speaking about this. So I’m grateful also for the opportunity to hear you talk about this. Before the conversation, Maya and Ruth also asked us to reflect on the question of ‘reading otherwise’. I tend to avoid the category of reading.

Lisa: Tell us why.

Ariella: When I encounter a photograph, for example, I’m trying not to read it as an object that is given to me but to interact with the people whose presence is registered in it. Against the protocol of the spectator, assumed as the one who comes after the photo was taken and can only read it, I insist on inhabiting the same temporal unit in a way that doesn’t fix the it the spectator is invited to read. The semiotics legacy that taught us to ‘read’ everything seemed very charming for a while since it expanded our permission to read non-textual objects that could otherwise fall out of our attention. But it also traps us in an imperial temporality that separates us in time and space from those we encounter through these objects. ‘Reading’ photographs often means accepting their status as representations. Against the use of photography as a technology that produces the past, I’m trying to refuse to inhabit the position of the spectator that is programmed to relegate those people whose pictures were seized from them to the past, where they become the objects we could read.

Lisa: That’s very helpful. So in a way, it’s like refusing to divide the time between you, as reading subject, and it, as dead object. And refusing that separation, as well as the hierarchy of power in it; or you want to think of alternative ways of remaining in relation, which I think is really, really important, and well put.

Maya: To pick up on that, Ariella, if I understand correctly, you’re trying not to ‘read’ as this implies a hierarchical subject-object opposition, or seems to foreclose the tactile, reciprocal, contingent nature of an encounter with an object or archive? So, ‘reading’ here is both a metaphor for an imperial mode of looking and knowledge production, as well as an actually-practised methodology in some (post)colonial institutions – how, for instance, some academic disciplines encourage scholars to identify and ‘read’ particular objects of study from a position of distant authority. If so, I want to ask you a bit more about how you see the relationship between reading as imperial technology, and reading as actual embodied practice, or plurality of practices. I’m interested in the extent to which you think it is possible to practise modes of ‘reading’ outside this imperial framework, especially from within an academic institution, or alternatively, the idea that ‘reading’ otherwise from within, or along, colonial structures might produce affects and meanings that are not contained by them?

Ariella: It’s not that I don’t read – obviously I’m reading all the time. The question is the way reading as a category or praxis defines our disposition within an entire structure or network of power relations. Why do we accept that what we are doing will be framed under the category of ‘reading’ or, will be reduced to reading in a way that we are interpellated to relate to others as our objects rather than the people with whom we are interacting? Reading also generates imperial distinctions between for example primary and secondary sources, that sustain the distinction between the tensions, etc.

We know that the people who struggled in 1492 are still here. So, ‘speaking with others’ is not a metaphor. It means we have to be humble, and have to refuse the position offered to us as if we have any advantage over them, since we are coming up with ‘new’ ideas and different ways of reading in a history of readings premised on the quality of the newest. When acknowledging our place in the world and attending to the struggles of others beyond the way that they are inscribed in different texts, what we are doing cannot be reading, but rather interacting with, joining or amplifying others’ struggles.

Lisa: To support what Ariella is saying, of course we are always reading like we’re breathing. I mean, there are different ways of doing it, and it’s rather when reading is a part of a disciplinary practice of extraction and mastery, then it becomes a kind of exercise over a piece of property that very much conforms to the types of imperial social relations that we’re describing. So, it seems as if Ariella is dramatising and seeking a modality of engagement that isn’t about subordination and possession and extraction but being with or interdependent with and so forth.

I think that’s very much what Ann Stoler is describing in her concept of reading along the archival grain. So, as much reading against the archive and refuting what the archive presents, but also reading along it: seeing its power, as well as what it cannot control.

Ariella: When I think again about your discussion of ‘Vanity Fair’ and C.L.R. James, Lisa, I think that you do not introduce him as a literary reader of the novel, but rather stage a different situation across the temporalities in which you, him, and the novel encounter each other. The different objects you bring in are also not simply read – they are mapped, sensed; they display the itineraries of their fabrication and circulation. It is not just thickening the reading but refusing the power relationship that reading imposes, which situates us in academia, and as external to previous struggles that took place outside of its walls.

When you study empire you never study it alone. It’s not only me and Lisa. It’s us joining millions of other people who resist imperialism’s epistemologies and ontologies. And these struggles cannot be organised in piles of texts that we read. The question is how we keep these previous struggles here, now, present, and refrain from the way academia commands us to discover, to unearth, to come up with ‘groundbreaking’ work, which in those cases would mean stealing people’s struggles. There cannot be anything groundbreaking about resisting empires. We have to continue to find the words to resist it, to say the obvious – how much empire is toxic – but arriving at this obviousness can take a decade every time. So, we have to reject the toxic vocabulary of academia and acknowledge that we are rehearsing our language to be able to see the same toxicity that our ancestors experienced.

Lisa: That is so well evoked, i.e. ‘staging a different situation across the temporalities in which you, him and the novel encounter’ one another. In addition, I think your book is continually doing this, seeing the importance of de-individualizing. Part of restoration or repair is re-collectivising even if it means putting something back into a community that has suffered a great deal of theft and obliteration. There’s a putting back in community or a re-communising (that’s not a word, but you understand what I mean). Because, especially in literary studies – which I’m imagining is where you’re asking this from – the mandate, the imperative is to have the newest, best reading of that object, and to master everything about it, which is exactly conforming to this kind of imperial subjectivity.

Maya: We were interested in whether ‘otherwise’ evokes some other, contingent relation to what’s gone before, rather than claiming newness; in other words, not only in defining what the ‘otherwise’ entails, but also in the mode of relation it enacts.

Lisa: I think one of the things that Potential History so powerfully puts forward is this idea of refusal, which is different than being ‘otherwise’, right? Because being otherwise, reading otherwise, otherwise temporalities still leaves the dominant centre in place. And, I think, what Ariella has been emphasising is the need to refuse granting that centrality to the dominant. And being committed to its end.

Ariella: Yes, and we cannot allow ourselves to forever invent the otherwise, right? It feels like every new scholar has to struggle and to come up with an ‘otherwise’, but if you go back, you realise that people already understood this. So, how do you find a way to join the choir of the anticolonial, or of the anti-empire, and to make it not new, but to amplify very strong voices that didn’t necessarily publish books but resisted empires?

Lisa: And of course, the academy is ready to commodify the ‘new’. So it loves and awaits any kind of ‘otherwise’.

Maya: Though you don’t use the word otherwise, you do both engage different kinds of temporalities – ‘potential history’ in Ariella’s work, and in Lisa’s, the ‘past conditional’ – as a means of evoking modes of being which exist, have existed, and could exist, alongside or beyond those enshrined by modernity. Could you elaborate a bit more on how you understand – and articulate – these temporalities’ relationship to (and difference from) colonial modernity, while also avoiding re-centring modernity in the way you describe?

Lisa: Well, I thought there was a lot of resonance between Ariella’s ‘potential history’ and what I’m calling the ‘past conditional temporality’, or what could have been, though I think potential history is more radical in ambition and scope. But you could think about the idea of simultaneous multiple temporalities and the past conditional temporality as being a way of getting at the anti-imperial – or the struggles against imperial configurations that always were there and are still there. And in a certain sense, the past conditional temporality also connects with what I discuss about the future anterior, the what will have been; I think this is what we are discussing when people call for a history of the present, right? By history of the present, we mean unsettling the givenness of our contemporary understanding of the present, the inevitable progress of capitalism and the imperial nation. It means freeing and bursting the containers with which the past has been fixed as past. In unsettling the givenness of the past, we understand that there were always contestations, always other modes of being in relation that have not been obliterated and separated.

To be more concrete, we both write quite a bit about W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America. He’s writing about the enormous backlash against abolition and the emancipation of the enslaved, in which US northern industrial capitalism allied with the southern peasant workers and the southern planters – what you might think of as a consolidation of whiteness. In other words, Du Bois is recounting the ways that the alliance of Black and white workers, as well as workers in China, India, and around the world, would have taken place if it had not been interrupted by this backlash. In this sense, Du Bois is writing about what could have been, if this cross-racial international contestation had not been thwarted. If the groups hadn’t been successfully divided, they might then have defeated this system of slavery and global empire. We wouldn’t be where we are now with US led neocolonial global capitalism. So, that is what I mean by ‘past conditional temporality’, the what could have been, which I think resonates a lot with Ariella’s idea of ‘potential history’.

Ariella: Yeah, completely. Reading Du Bois for the first time was a real wow – his way of undermining the status of the document – the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13 amendments – by instead conceptualising what 500,000 enslaved people did while running away from the plantations as what determined the war and endowed them with freedom. Du Bois turns the document from a primary source into something that is secondary to their actions. And in general, writing Black Reconstruction in the 30s he is refusing to go to the archive and reads only what is considered ‘secondary sources’, written press, thus undermining the regime of academic reading. His refusal to go to the archive allows him to come up with a speculative history of slavery. He is not looking for the enslaved voices to read about how they were planning the general strike. Rather sixty-five years later, he is interacting with them and intervening in the flow of the documents-based archive and accounting for what they were doing as a general strike.

Approximately the same time, between 1936 and 1939, there was a general strike in Palestine. Palestinians are striking against the British Empire and against its actions and promises to European Zionists, to give them Palestine as if it was Britain’s property. In the 70s, Ghassan Kanafani wrote his essay ‘The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine’ on the general strike in Palestine. He didn’t read Du Bois but he’s trying to do a similar thing in a way that he is articulating a struggle that is not over. He’s articulating it against the terms used by those who repress the striked whom they call “rioters” and exercise violence against them.

The burning question of potential history resides in how we can undo the materialisation of violence in history, in the law, in our bodies. This is what Du Bois does in the 30s in relation to the end of slavery. This is what Kanafani tries to do. It hasn’t worked yet, but this doesn’t mean that we cannot continue Kanafani and engage with the general strike as still going on until Palestine returns. So, I think that for both Lisa and for me, temporality is also about the way that we reconfigure our imaginary together with those who preceded us.

Lisa: And it involves undoing the customary organisation of history and temporality to explore what was always possible and what may be possible still.

Ariella: Yeah, what is possible, and what ought to be possible.

The conversation took place in July 2021.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature, Brown University. Email: [email protected]

Lisa Lowe

Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies and Professor of Ethnicity, Race, & Migration at Yale University. Email: [email protected]

Maya Caspari

Maya Caspari is a Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Email: [email protected]

Ruth Daly

Ruth Daly is a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Global Creative Industries at the University of Leeds. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Altınay and Pető, ‘Gender, Memory and Connective Genocide Scholarship’, 395.

2 Azoulay, Potential History, 286 and 288.

3 Following the Haitian Revolution, the British Colonial Office issued a Secret Memorandum to the East India Company, calling for Asian indentured labour in Trinidad. See Lowe, Intimacies, 21-23.

4 See Benjamin, Toward the Critique of Violence.

5 See Gordon, Ghostly Matters.

6 In 1991, a burial ground dating from the 1630s to 1795 was discovered in Manhattan. The African Burial Ground, now a national monument, contained the skeletal remains of an estimated 15,000 enslaved and free Africans who lived and worked in colonial New York.

7 The 1985 city-sanctioned bombing of the Black liberation group MOVE killed eleven people, including five children. The remains of child victims Delisha and Katricia “Tree” Africa were unethically retained and mishandled by the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. The remains of the victims were used for teaching and research without consent of their family members. Thirty-six years after the bombing, amid protests in West Philadelphia, the victims’ remains were returned to family members.

8 Lowe, Intimacies, 71.

9 See Sharpe, In the Wake.