Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Potential History Unlearning

Imperialism (Verso, 2019)

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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books and Intellectual History. I'm
your host, Georgios Giannakopoulos.

Today I'm delighted to host Ariella Julay. Ariella is a theorist, curator, filmmaker, and
she's currently teaching political thought and visual culture at Brown University. Well, for
the benefit of our audience, Ariella, I'd like you to say a few words of introduction about
yourself and your work.

Yeah, so thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here and to talk with you about my
new work in the context of my work in general. So I'm working in between two
disciplines.

One is political theory. The other is, let's say, media studies or photography studies or
visual culture. And what I'm trying to do is to work across these disciplines and to ask
questions from a commitment to non-imperial thinking, questions that challenge,
actually, the foundations of these two disciplines.

So just to give you a broad context of my work, in the last, I don't know, decade or
decade and a half, I wrote a few things about photography, but it is not in the sense of
the history of photography or theory of photography in a narrow sense. But through
photography, I'm trying to ask numerous questions about the way that we share the
world together. So, for example, in The Civil Contract of Photography, a few years ago, a
few years, I think it's almost two decades or one decade and a half, what I try to do is,
rather than just understanding photography as a productive practice that produces
photographs, I change the focus onto the event of photography, the moment of
encounter between the photographer, photographed persons, and those who then
consume them, look at them, view them.

And rather than accepting this kind of recognition of the photographer as the initiator of
the event of photography, I try to look at different moments when the event of
photography is initiated by the photograph persons, or the way that spectators initiate
the event, rather than the photograph itself. And what I try to do is to assume a kind of
contract, a civil contract, between the users of photography, because I assume that
photography in itself was a very violent practice. And I assume it is a very violent
practice because someone holds a camera and appropriates the image to himself, and
then can do with the image whatever they like.

So I try to look at the history of photography, and to provide a certain kind of potential
history. I didn't use the term yet of potential history, but trying to understand how the
event cannot be appropriated by one side, which is the photographer. And hence, I tried
to reflect on the way, the different ways that photograph persons participate in the
situation.

Right. Great. Thank you.

And indeed, this book that we're talking about today, which is called, the full title is
Potential History, Unlearning Imperialism, is in some ways a continuation, as I take it off
your previous work on photography, but you're expanding your scope in other fields as
well. So I was wondering, you write in the introduction of the book, this book project,
Potential History, culminates almost a decade of research. So as a way to start talking
about the book, I wanted to ask you, what was it that led you to this project? And was it
some form of evolution from your previous writings on the history of photography and
visual culture? So the answer would be yes and no.

It's a continuation, but it's a departure. So maybe I'll try to say a few words about this.
But if you allow me, I would like to say a few words more about the previous book in
order to differentiate them and to create a continuity.

So I think that in The Civil Contract of Photography, I have already written a potential
history of photography. But what I was able to understand then as a potential history of
photography, what I tried to do is rather than understanding photography, as I said, as
something that is initiated by the photographer, it was a community of different
participants. And it was also a potential history of the notion of citizenship.

Rather than recognizing the state as the apparatus that should define the way that we
share the world with other people with whom we are governed, I try to understand the
political space as a space that is shared by those who are recognized as citizens and
those who are not recognized and are non-citizens. And by that, I started also to provide
a certain type of potential history of citizenship. And I think that when it comes to this
new book on potential history, and I think that this is why it took me one decade to work
on it, to complete the research and to complete the writing, in potential history, it is an
attempt to think in a wider way about 500 years of imperialism.

So it is a potential history of imperialism in the sense that rather than accepting the way
that imperial practices invites us or compels us to think about whatever was achieved by
violence as a fait accompli, I'm trying to go back to those moments of violence and say
that everything that was achieved there is reversible. Saying it differently, if imperialism
is built, you know, like a building in one floor on top of the other, for example, destroying
Palestine, and saying that Palestine is gone, and on top of Palestine you have Israel, and
from the moment when you have Israel, so you have Israeli art with its history, you have
Israeli politics with its history, and you cannot even think any longer about the fact that
Palestine is not the other of Israel elsewhere, but Palestine is in the same place. So
potentializing history is going to those moments of violence, like 1492 in the global
context, like 1948 in the context of Palestine, like 1830 in the context of Algeria, and
trying to account for the potentialities that were actually smashed by imperial
procedures and imperial histories.

So in a sense, the book really challenges what I didn't do in such a direct way in my
previous work, challenges the discipline or the practice of history, and actually show its
complicity with the world that was shaped by imperialism. Right. Well, yeah, in fact, we'll
talk about that in a second.

Before we move on, I just wanted to clarify one thing about your use of the term
potential. It seems in, you know, what's called potential history, it seems to me the word
may have two meanings. One is obviously a contingent future, a future that one cannot
foresee in different ways.

But also potential, the term has a teleology as well, realize your potential. You know, I
would assume that the way you understand potential history would be to focus on
contingency, and how we shape our own alternative futures. I don't know if I'm getting
this right, or if there's anything more you want to say about the term potential.

Yeah, no, you're getting it completely right. But let me just add one thing, for example,
about the future, the possible futures. So what matters is not to look now for possible
futures, in a sense that we will come up with new inventions, how to impose on people's
life new formations.

The idea is to go back, to rewind history, and actualize potential futures that were at any
different moment. So for example, in the context of Palestine, which I've just mentioned,
it would be to go back to the promises of the generation of the great, great parents of
Jews and Arabs that promised to themselves that they will preserve, they will protect the
shared world against those nationalists, and especially the Jewish nationalists that came
up with this project of destroying Palestine. So what I'm trying to account for in the book,
and I also did a film about it, Civil Alliances, is to look at the moment in 47, when the UN
resolution for the partitioning of Palestine was challenged and opposed, not only by
Palestinians, as historians narrated, but it was opposed also by the Jews.

And I'm trying to locate hundreds of civil alliances between Jews and Palestinians in
different locations all around the country. But this will lead me to give you another
meaning of potential history. And this is why the book engages with different key terms
in political theory, or not only in political theory, for example, sovereignty, for example,
human rights, for example, art.

If you take the term art and you see how much of the material world of different people
were destroyed, and best samples were appropriated and plundered into Western
museums, and you see that all of them became under this umbrella of the term art, you
have to question the term art. How come that such term can host so much violence, and
translate all the objects that carries this violence, or that they were extracted through
violence, the violence is removed from them, and they are being viewed by spectators in
the museum as works of art. So the work that I'm trying to do is to see how the term art
came to be, and how much violence was involved in this term.

And in this sense, rather than accepting that museums were there, and objects from all
around the world were sent to these museums, I'm trying to reverse the perspective, and
to show that so much violence was exercised against people in different countries,
mainly Africa, the Middle East, India, so much violence was exercised against them, and
their culture was plundered. We have to understand museums as the outcome of
plunder, rather than the other way around, museums as kind of neutral vessels that just
receive in a passive way objects that are coming into their doors. So in the same, for
example, for human rights, rather than accepting the way that the concept of human
rights is defined in its connection to document-based culture, as if human rights are
documents, they are papers, they are proclamations, they are a declaration of rights of
the man and citizen, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I'm trying to locate
rights in objects, rights in environment, and then look at rights as something that a
community shares, rather than looking at rights as something that belongs to individual,
and is given or taken by state apparatuses.

Right. Well, a lot to unpack there. In fact, let's begin, as you begin the book, talking
about, as you mentioned earlier, museums and archives.

In what you said, previously said about the museums, I was wondering if you could, like,
in what way would your account differ from the workings of institutional critique, and
calls to make the Western museums and their visitors more accountable to the injustices
inflicted by colonialism. And as you know, that is a story from the 60s onwards in the
Western museums. So how would you differentiate what you're doing from, you know,
what even an academic discipline like the critical history of art is doing with institutional
critique? So, you know, the challenge is not always necessarily to show how do a work
differs, you know, I have in a book, my critique, let's say, of the way that as scholars, we
are interpolated all the time to do new work.

And this actually would fragment our possibility to imagine beyond a world beyond
imperialism and beyond racial capitalism. So after saying that, I would like now to say
what I think differentiate some of what I'm doing from others, but on the other hand, ties
me very closely to other people who are doing anti-imperial or anti-racial capitalist work.
So I think that much of the institution critique are left behind the context of 500 years of
imperialism.

It was the critique of institutions, but assuming that these institutions exist in a way, or
forgetting there are imperial crimes, and also forgetting the way that certain keywords in
our political thinking in itself is emblems of imperial violence. For example, the fact that
the entire discourse of human rights relies on documents of freedoms or documents of
rights, and embraces some of its milestones in the French Revolution, which was actually
to reassert, reaffirm its colonies and slavery, or the American Revolution, which gave
birth to a slave state, or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, that was
achieved through so much violence of destroying people's imaginary, the imperial allies,
the imperial actors who gave us the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, actually
smashed and killed and massacred people all around the world. Just think about the end
of World War II that ended with massacres in Senegal, massacres in Algeria, the rape of
German women, all these catastrophes that enabled them to give rights.

So, you know, unlike the way, for example, not unlike, but let's say alongside Hannah
Arendt's argument about the right to have rights, what I'm trying to do is rather than
looking at those who were denied rights as the focus of the discourse of rights, I'm
looking at those who acquired to themselves or appropriated the right to give rights to
others. And I think that when it comes to the discourse of rights, we have also to account
for imperial rights, not only the rights that we associate with rights that are being given
to people, because all this idea that you give rights to people is tied to these imperial
rights of people who put themselves in the position that they have the right to destroy
other people's worlds and to give them rights. So the right to give rights is the crucial, or
sorry, let's say it's at the heart of the imperial project.

So what I'm trying to do is not only institutional critique, but to criticize or to challenge
the foundations of the key terms that we are using, even the term of institution, or even
the term critique, that is critique that was generated within a very particular discourse,
without accounting, for example, for 500 years of opposition to institutions, because in
all those places that were conquered, the colonized people, they revolted against the
imposition of those institutions. But this institutional critique, with quotation marks, was
never accounted for in the tradition of institutional critique. So what I'm trying to do is to
align my work with 500 years of opposition to those institutions and trying to challenge
their foundation.

I hope it gives you an answer. It's a very long answer, but I cannot take shortcuts.
Indeed, indeed, we will unpack your take on human rights a bit further.

For now, I wanted to move from the museum to the archive. And here, you know, you
have many polemical themes and a particular stance about the archive and how we
understand the archive. Just to quote from you, the archive does not preserve
documents as much as it creates documents as objects of preservation.

That's a quote from the book. And I wanted to probe a bit more your thinking on the
archive by also asking you to reflect on your experience using, for instance, or not using,
rather, in the context of the book, photographs from the International Committee of the
Red Cross archives, and how you understand the archive in the book, and also your
experiences with archives. Yeah, so yeah, so thank you for raising the question of the
archive.

It's really fundamental, I think, in the book. And thank you also for bringing this quotation
because, you know, when we speak about archives, we have different but very common
imaginaries that bring us to look at those papers that are in boxes and in drawers and
white gloves. And, you know, all the profanalia that is related with how do we treat
documents with a certain sacredness, with a certain respect, in a way that we feel our
freedom to interpret them.

But what we do not think when we go to the archive is about the production of these
documents. So, rather than having this imaginary of, you know, very tedious hands or
cataloging documents and treating them with care, prudence and care, with gloves, etc.,
I'm looking at the military when they come to different places, destroy entire
environments and go back with piles of documents. I am looking at moments that are
called, you know, slave auction, but are actually scenes of kidnapping of people and
trafficking in bodies.

And I'm looking at the archivist in these scenes, the guy who holds the paper that says
the price of the people, or that says that this person or that person that was kidnapped
from now on will be recognized as a slave. And we as scholars, when we go to the
archive, we are expected to look for documents of slavery or to look for documents
through which we can learn about slaves. So I'm saying, okay, let's step back a little bit.

Rather than associate the archive with the documents that are already there, let's see
how these documents are being produced. And then I'm speaking about the archive not
only as an institution in which there are documents, but I'm speaking about imperialism
as a particular type of violence that is documents-based. There is no one type of violence
exercised by imperialism for which we don't have documents.

So we have to treat documents as emblems of violence. And this is what I'm trying to do.
So I'm speaking about the archive as the institution, the archive as archival violence,
which is the way that, you know, coming to your question about the archive of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, I'm looking at an image of a Palestinian in
June 1948, very close to where the state of Israel will draw its border.

And this Palestinian guy who is, I don't know, in his 60s or maybe even 70s, he decides
that he doesn't want to continue with the caravan of expellees that the Jewish state,
we're already speaking about the Jewish states, one or two months after its creation,
they are expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. And he crouches, he holds his
cane, and he says, I don't move. I stay put.

This is my homeland. So I'm looking at him. And I'm looking at how he refuses to become
the embodiment of the category of the refugee.

So this is, for me, imperial violence, expelling Palestinians from their homeland, and
calling them disoperation, either repatriation, even though they are being expelled, or
calling the people who are being expelled refugees is actually exercising archival
violence. Why archival violence? Because from the moment when this guy who crouches
and doesn't want to walk farther, but from the moment more violence will be exercised
against him, and he will be pushed a few meters forward, and will be pushed a few
moments later in time, he will become refugee. What does it mean refugee? He will
embody this archival category.

So the archive is not only documents, the archive is the violence that transform people
into refugees, slaves, undocumented people, etc. Very good. And when, however, when
the archive, when that picture, you know, is documented, catalogued, and everything,
then there are legal regimes there, right? And you talk about in the photograph, simply
because of the caption that the photograph that you were somehow obliged to carry with
the photograph.

Sorry, can you repeat? Yes, I am saying that the photograph that you mentioned, it also
has become a document. And you talk in the book about how you weren't able due to
legal restrictions, to use the photograph as a matter, as a means to, because of the
caption that you were, you had to carry with you. Yes.

So, you know, institutions continue to exercise the violence that was exercised when the
documents were produced in order to be integrated in the archive. So the Red Cross, for
example, they were part of the international organizations that assisted, that attended
the expulsion of Palestinians. They were there in a kind of neutral way.
They observed, but they provided terms. And in their archive, the photographs that I
viewed, describes this violence of expulsion as repatriation. Their archive didn't let me
show these images if I will append my way to relate to these images.

They wanted me to, if I want to use these photographs, to use it only with their caption.
And their caption says that this Palestinian who is being expelled is a prisoner of war.
And I know that he's not a prisoner of war.

It says that this is repatriation. I know that this is not repatriation because he's being
deported. And I know that there are no Jewish zones and Arab zones in such a neutral
way as they are pretending in the caption.

So the fact that in the archive, those images stay for decades with these captions and
every new scholar is invited to give his own or her own interpretation to the photograph,
but we are not allowed to change substantially the caption and to reinscribe it in the
archive, shows you how violence is being reproduced by the archive. Let me give you an
example from a different context, which is, I think, crucial and illustrated in a very
concise way. There is a series of daguerreotypes that were taken in 1850 by a racist who
founded the Harvard Science School, Agassiz.

And he took photographs of people who were kidnapped from Africa and were enslaved
in the South. And these daguerreotypes were kept in the Peabody Museum at Harvard
University for many, many years since they were taken in 1850. And the descendant of
one of the photographed persons tracked down her lineage to Renty Taylor, one of the
enslaved, and she sued the archive because she wants the image back, because the
image was produced under violence and is kept under violence by Harvard.

And what she claims is that her great-grandfather, Renty Taylor, is enslaved by Harvard
for 169 years, which means from the moment when the daguerreotype was seized from
him. What she claims in her lawsuit is that after slavery was abolished in the US in the
60s of the 19th century, Harvard continued to hold Renty Taylor as a slave 169 years
since then. So what she's actually saying is that this is not a daguerreotype, which
means a precious art object or a precious document.

This is my great-great-great-father. This is what she's saying, and hence I should have
this image. So not only she claims the restitution of this image, she actually undermines
the foundation or the legal basis for Harvard to claim that they are the owner of this
image.

And this is crucial because here also what we have is the way that the understanding
what photography is was defined, or the notion of photography was shaped by, you
know, slaveholders, by other imperial actors who were allowed or allowed themselves to
expropriate this, let's say, visual wealth from people that they used as raw material to
create our, you know, photographic archives or our document archives. So rather than
looking at the discrete images or discrete documents, I'm looking at photography and on
this paper culture.

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