Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media, and of Comparative Literature at Brown University, as well as a curator and filmmaker. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions-an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums-to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.ĭr. Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.īy practicing what she calls potential history, Dr. In her 2019 book, Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism, Professor Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay in Conversation with Laurie Monahan, with Moderator Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

Ariella azoulay unlearning imperialism