Potential h/Histories
In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso 2019), the scholar of political theory and photography Ariella Aïsha Azoulay offers various tactics in order to refuse the narrative order imposed by the dominant, western onto-epistemological framework; and craft “nonimperial grammars”. As she writes: “Unlearning imperialism involves different types of “de-”, such as decompressing and decoding; “re-”, such as reversing and rewinding; and “un-”, such as unlearning and undoing. (…) Such rehearsals in nonimperial political thinking and archival practice are not undertaken in preparation for an imminent day of reckoning, but rather as a mode of being with others differently.”
This online conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay will inaugurate Qalqalah قلقلة’s four-month affiliation with TQW and allow us to sketch some of the theoretical and methodological questions that we would like to enact during the rest of the programme.
professor of Modern Culture and Media and of Comparative Literature, Brown University, film essayist and curator of archives and exhibitions. Selected books: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); exhibitions: Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016); and films: Like a jewel in the hand (2022) and Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019).
In English