Main entry:

Azoulay, Ariella, author.

Title & Author:

Potential history : unlearning imperialism / Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

Publication:

London ; Brooklyn, NY : Verso, 2019.
©2019

Description:

xvi, 634 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 582-627) and index.
Unlearning imperialism -- Plunder, objects, art, rights -- Imagine going on strike: museum workers -- Archives: the commons, not the past -- Imagine going on strike: photographers -- Potential history: not with the master's tools, not with tools at all -- Imagine going on strike: historians -- Worldly sovereignty -- Imagine going on strike: the governed -- Human rights -- Imagine going on strike until our world is repaired -- Repair, reparations, return: the condition of worldliness.

Summary:

In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. 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. 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. By practicing what she calls potential history, 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. 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. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

ISBN:

9781788735711 (paperback)
9781788735704 (hardcover)
1788735706 (hardcover)
9781788735735 (US EBK)
1788735730
9781788735728 (UK EBK)
1788735722
1788735714 (paperback)

Subject:

Imperialism.
Knowledge, Sociology of.
History Philosophy.
Museums Acquisitions Moral and ethical aspects.
Archives Acquisitions Moral and ethical aspects.
Reparations for historical injustices.
Learning and scholarship Moral and ethical aspects.
Impérialisme.
Sociologie de la connaissance.
Histoire Philosophie.
Musées Acquisitions Aspect moral.
Archives Acquisitions Aspect moral.
Réparations des crimes de l'histoire.
Savoir et érudition Aspect moral.
sociology of knowledge.
Museums Acquisition Moral and ethical aspects
Archives Acquisition Moral and ethical aspects
Anerkennung
Fotografie
Freiheit
Fundament
Geschichtsphilosophie
Gewalt
Imperialismus
Kolonialismus
Politik
Postkolonialismus
Wiedergutmachung
Wissen
Wissenssoziologie

Holdings:

Location: Library main 315654
Call No.: 315654
Copy: 1
Status: Available