For instance, one of the most strikingly aspects of the report was its focus on historical memory sedimented as trauma on the one hand and institutionalized as art history on the other.
When Felwine Sarr and Benedicte Savoy’s report on African art in French museums, Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Towards a New Relational Ethics, was published, we organized a teach-in on the report at Brown University to join on-going debates on the restitution of colonial collections and to expand on its political imagination. In thinking forced migrations of objects looted by European imperial powers in the “past” and contemporary migration of peoples in the “present,” what would need to change to think these two forced migrations of objects and people together? How does one “decolonize” this separation between objects in museums and people in detention border camps so as to make reparations and hospitality necessary modalities of living together again? My own reading of the book comes from working with Ariella Azoulay and Yannis Hamilakis on the Decolonial Initiative on the Migration of Objects and People, which we forged around one of the ideas in the book that the forced migrations of objects welcomed into museal modalities of art needed to be restituted so that people on the move, fleeing catastrophes from former colonized lands from where these objects had been looted, could be/had to be extended the same hospitality, restitution and repair so that we could rebuild our world together. Below are responses to the book by a historian, a media studies scholar, an archaeologist, artist, and the book’s verso editor, as each take the book to task, turning its pages to reflect and incite, or simply deliberate on the unruly practice of our distinct crafts that the book invites us to engage.
If there ever was a time, captured and sequestered as the past, the book calls us into the “now” with the sense of urgency, the “potential,” of our deeply felt revolutionary capacity, and expands our lexicon for restitution and repair. "Īriella Aïsha Azoulay’s book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019) is an incendiary text, a call to unlearn and strike against the imperial formations of history and art, and although forged over more than a decade of thinking and writing, it came situated between a historic report on African art in French museums (November 2018) that stirred up renewed debate on colonial looting, and the toppling of a slave trader’s statue in Bristol (March 7th, 2020). This essay is from the Verso roundtable, "Unlearning Imperialism: Responses to Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's Potential History.
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