This decoupling, which she outlined in her last book Civil Imagination, allows for photography to occasion political theory. Unlearning Imperialism means, instead, to reject a temporality that consigns violences to a remote past to see resistance and contestation present at every step of imperialism’s longue durée and to amplify dormant potentialities crushed in imperialism’s forward drive.Īzoulay can be a challenging photographic theorist, largely because photographs for her are not strictly essential to the study of photography. Just as much anti- and ante-imperialism, Azoulay is clear to distinguish her call from selective nostalgia or amnesia. 1 Such a turn to history might seem strange to those attentive to the recent nostalgia politics around the globe or those who fear that unlearning imperialism means an annulment of its inventory of traumas. With the urgency of a manifesto and the volume of a brick, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s recent book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism foregrounds and rejects structural, sustained imperialisms as the basis for a shared world and asks readers to begin the ongoing project of actively challenging imperialism’s alleged inevitability.

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.

Reviewed by Luke Urbain, University of Wisconsin-MadisonĪriella Aïsha Azoulay.

Azoulay potential history