Between each chapter Azoulay makes compelling proposals and draws on imagination as a challenge to seemingly incontestable histories. The book begins by considering the looted object, the museum and the archive while later chapters turn to questions of the discipline of history, sovereignty, human rights and reparations. She is not suggesting that we counter the work of imperialism with alternative narratives, but rather, that we pursue an ongoing process of unlearning and undoing of the knowledge structures that sought to fix events, timelines and facts. She proposes a methodological approach to historical and archival materials that refuses to consign them to an irretrievable past. To unlearn imperialism, Azoulay suggests that we reject a temporality that consigns violence to the distant past and instead attend to its still-present potentialities. Potential History asks us to unlearn imperial modes of thinking, the archive, the museum, the document, and history itself. It is an endeavour to think against and before imperialism, while simultaneously recognising that we are always already conditioned by it.

Photographic theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites us to return to a moment before 'original' imperial violence occurred and set to work from there. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism is a call to de-imperialise museums, archives and the discipline of history itself. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 656 pp, ISBN 9781788735711

Ariella azoulay unlearning imperialism