Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: “It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world”

wow. how i love this.

Sabrina Alli: Potential History is a project spanning centuries and nations, from the mass expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492 to Palestine today. It is a critique of and intervention in imperial knowledge production and the technologies that make it possible—museums, national archives, the discipline of history, the discourse of human rights, and the camera, which “made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world’s construction on empire’s terms.” Azoulay, who, in addition to being an author, is a filmmaker and professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, expands upon a theory from her seminal book, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, by positioning the roots of photography in extraction and erasure.

With Potential History, Azoulay aims “to make non-imperial sense out of existing knowledge that imperialism has manipulated and relegated to different domains.” This includes reimagining everything from timelines to political sovereignty to interpretations of individual photographs.

Of course, this work is not for the imagination alone. Azoulay, who disavows her Israeli citizenship, calls for open borders and the fundamental right to migration. She argues that people whose worlds have been destroyed by centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture and now sit in the “neutralizing” space of Western-style museums. In fact, she suggests, those objects might constitute the very “documentation” the countries hosting those museums demand of migrants.

The political theorist argues that those whose worlds have been destroyed by five centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture. More here.

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