Potential h/Histories

In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso 2019), the scholar of political theory and photography Ariella Aïsha Azoulay offers various tactics in order to refuse the narrative order imposed by the dominant, western onto-epistemological framework; and craft “nonimperial grammars”. As she writes: “Unlearning imperialism involves different types of “de-”, such as decompressing and decoding; “re-”, such as reversing and rewinding; and “un-”, such as unlearning and undoing. (…) Such rehearsals in nonimperial political thinking and archival practice are not undertaken in preparation for an imminent day of reckoning, but rather as a mode of being with others differently.”