Potential History by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

The book envelops and emplaces the reader, engrossed in its unfolding. For Potential History reads with both the relentlessness and generosity of an influential zine. To be sure, Potential History is a text that deserves to be engaged as much as it deserves to be challenged.Īriella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books, 2019)Īriella Aïsha Azoulay’s new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is massive yet simple, so that you might, despite its 643-page enormity, carry it around with you wherever you go, ever intending to study it further. Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman meditates on the political timelines and trajectories Azoulay illustrates Gil Hochberg situates Azoulay’s project in existing academic and political contexts while questioning its form and reach Zoé Samudzi draws attention to the figure of the camera and offers a liberal reading that embraces refusal and impossibility and Joshua Simon sketches a personal engagement and notes Azoulay’s own institutional positioning. We invited a group of artists, scholars, and critics to respond. Addressing multiple, intersecting histories of exploitation and expropriation, and exploring possibilities for their reparation and restitution, Azoulay disentangles the power structures in which we are implicated while eschewing easy escapes or disavowals.Īzoulay’s text is a complex one, ranging fields and posing difficult questions in a multi-form book that spans seven thick chapters.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a magisterial call to reorient our relations to objects, archives, art, and plunder.

Potential History by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay