LAUSR

Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a long, passionately written account of the looting spree that created modernity. The book reads as though it were composed by Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” who backs, horrified, into the future while in front of him the ruins pile up. The angel, in this case, is the citizen, forced into the position of a perpetrator and trying to unwind history, to undo it not to return to a “golden age,” but to do away with traditional chronological thinking altogether. Azoulay’s angel (my word, not hers) wants to find a way to think history as something other than a timeline of so-called “progress,” replete with befores and afters, backwards and forwards, a history that makes the state of things at present appear inevitable. Even the fight against tyranny in all its forms is generally tamed when it plays a role in a history with an inevitable timeline and direction, a series of steps, or milestones. The ambition of Potential History is to institute a new form of temporality, or rather, to think the ethics of history without temporality. The book is fervent in its immediacy and urgency. The repeated refrain of expressions such as “kill me if you wish” (spoken by a native witnessing the theft of his land’s cultural heritage) resonates in its equation of the loss of objects with the loss of life. And indeed, the equation is accurate: the objects taken, buried in archives and displayed in museums were central to the lives and culture whence they were taken. The phrase recalls the title of the anti-colonial French film of 1953, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die). This film and many other sources recognized the destruction of cultures caused by looting of this sort. Not only in Africa, but the removal of European altarpieces, paintings, icons, into the isolation of the museum showcase or gallery wall, the display and collection of cultural objects, archiving, and the entire system of order that the imperialist depends upon, amounts to the violent separation from the world from which the objects and documents came, contributing to the violence of the destruction of that world.