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.