Missing and Missed: Rehumanisation, the Nation and Missing-ness

Rousseau, Nicky; Moosage, Riedwaan; Rassool, Ciraj

doi:10.17159/2309-9585/2018/v44a2

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Indeed, Ciraj Rassool has argued that the objects that travelled to institutions along with human remains might be thought of as deeply connected with those human remains and therefore in themselves ancestors. 5 In Potential History, Azoulay offers a critique of the canon of history as a mode for studying the processes of looting and dispossession. Her argument that we recognise the legacies of imperialism manifest in the discipline of history is important, as is her critique of the ways in which history periodises and historicises the world, separating past from present and objects from people.…”

Section: Kronos 46mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 656 pp, ISBN 9781788735711

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2020

Kronos.

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019), 656 pp, ISBN 9781788735711 Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism is a call to de-imperialise museums, archives and the discipline of history itself. Photographic theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay invites us to return to a moment before 'original' imperial violence occurred and set to work from there. It is an endeavour to think against and before imperialism, while simultaneously recognising that we are always already conditioned by it. Potential History asks us to unlearn imperial modes of thinking, the archive, the museum, the document, and history itself. 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. She proposes a methodological approach to historical and archival materials that refuses to consign them to an irretrievable past. 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.

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Section: Kronos 46mentioning

confidence: 99%