If there ever was a time, captured and sequestered as the past, the book calls us into the “now” with the sense of urgency, the “potential,” of our deeply felt revolutionary capacity, and expands our lexicon for restitution and repair. "Īriella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) is an incendiary text, a call to unlearn and strike against the imperial formations of history and art, and although forged over more than a decade of thinking and writing, it came situated between a historic report on African art in French museums (November 2018) that stirred up renewed debate on colonial looting, and the toppling of a slave trader’s statue in Bristol (March 7th, 2020). This essay is from the Verso roundtable, "Unlearning Imperialism: Responses to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Potential History.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |