Before Violence, after Empire: Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History; Unlearning Imperialism
Keywords: 
empire
violence
Palestine
photography
archive
history
sovereignty
human rights
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.

Author biography: 

C. Heike Schottenis 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 UniversityPress, 2018)