Plunder, objectification, and, most elementally, systemic, and bodily violence are organizing features of photography, archives, museums, and the discipline of history itself - all of which serve as imperial technologies of extraction, conquest, control, and dehumanization.ġ492 stands adjacent to the 1948 expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from Palestine and the demolition and erasure of more than 400 of their villages, as well as to the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, which marked the beginning of 150 years of bloody, settler-colonial rule. The naturalization of policemen exercising the right to disperse people from public spaces should be understood as part of the post-WWII literacy lessons in human rights.ĭoes the history of photography, in actuality, start in 1492? In her latest tour de force, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay reframes the history of photography, the archive, and the museum by proposing that the camera’s “shutter” is a “synecdoche” for imperialism as a whole. From Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Verso Books, 2019) (all images courtesy Verso Books) | As part of the “new world order” imposed at the end of WWII, policemen everywhere were trained to break up civil movements, protests, and strikes using direct and indirect violence, always in the name of a law constituted through this same violence.

Ariella azoulay unlearning imperialism