Azoulay - Selection From Potential History
Azoulay - Selection From Potential History
Unlearning Imperialism
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this box to help claim the existence of a different world, one where vio-
lence that ought not to have happened could be unimaginable again.
In the midst of the violence that the 1947 partition plan unleashed, in
the proximity of this box, Jews and Arabs exchanged mutual promises
of cooperation to hold the world-destroying violence at bay. These
promises were broken, but not by those who exchanged them; they
were violated by Jewish militias. The Arab village was invaded and
many of its inhabitants were massacred. The future of this violence
that was made past should be aborted.
When I moved to the United States in 2013 and joined the faculty
at Brown University, I felt how easily one could be drawn into the fast-
forward project of the neoliberal American university. Surrounded
here by the wealth of objects, documents, images, and resources avail-
able in public and private museums, archives and universities, I soon
felt obliged to delve into the study of worlds that the accumulation
and dubious ownership of such wealth helped to destroy. This was a
natural expansion of my interest in the potential history of Palestine
and its destruction. I came to understand that the structural defer-
ral of reparations for slavery was the organizing principle of imperial
political regimes as well as the intellectual wealth of universities. The
challenge became how not to become imperialism’s ambassador and
not to normalize the privileged access to these objects offered to schol-
ars, and rather to recognize others’ rights to and in them.
Out of my commitment to the radical return of Palestine and to
a radical negation of “the past” that operates as a way to shut down
potential history and close shut the wooden box I had opened to think
with, in writing this book I found myself changing scales. Instead of
focusing on several decades in the history of Palestine, my research
came to span centuries and to cross the globe, dictated by the history
of imperialism. Without undermining differences between places, sit-
uations, and lived experiences, I tried to use this change of scale to
consolidate an anti-imperial onto-epistemological framework through
which everything and every place affected by western imperialism
could be thought together.
These changes in scale helped me to further elaborate the political
ontology of photography (a subject to which I dedicated several books)
and to account for it as a central part of imperial technology. Photog-
raphy, in this sense, is irreducible to the invention of a scopic device.
The thrust-forward rhythm of the click of the camera’s shutter acts like
xvi Preface
dissect, and exploit others’ worlds to enrich their own culture. Imagine
instead that those origins go back to 1492. What could this mean?
To answer this question we have to unlearn the expert knowl-
edge that calls upon us to account for photography as having its own
origins, histories, practices, or futures and to explore it as part of the
imperial world in which it emerged. We have to unlearn its seemingly
obvious ties to previous and future modes of producing images and
to problematize these ties that reduce photography to its products,
its products to their visuality, and its scholars to specialists of images
oblivious to the constitutive role of imperialism’s major mechanism—
the shutter. Unlearning photography as a field apart means first and
foremost foregrounding the regime of imperial rights that made its
emergence possible.
Let me present briefly an excerpt from the well-known report by
Dominique François Arago, which was delivered in 1839 before the
Chambre des Deputies and is considered a foundational moment in
the discourse of photography. The speech is often quoted as an early
attempt to define and advocate the practice and technology of pho-
tography. I propose to read it as a performance of the naturalization of
the imperial premise out of which photography emerged. That Arago,
a statesman and a man of his time, confirms the imperial premises of
photography and praises its goals is no surprise. What is striking is how
his ideas are reiterated in non-statesmen’s texts, including works that
rejected the imperial order and goals, such as Walter Benjamin’s “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Such reiteration
is testament to the way photography was rooted in imperial forma-
tions of power: first and foremost the use of violence, the exercise of
imperial rights, and the creation and destruction of shared worlds.
Dominique François Arago:
Walter Benjamin:
French statesmen and scientists. The right to dissect and study people’s
worlds—the Napoleonic expeditions are a paradigmatic example—
and render their fragments into pieces to be meticulously copied is
taken for granted. For that to happen, those who are harmed by the
use of the new means of reproduction, which (to take one example)
had been imposed and used systematically by Napoleon’s brigade of
draughtsmen during the expedition to Egypt should be bracketed and
left outside of these debates in which the fate of photography is dis-
cussed, and the rights to operate it are directly and indirectly accorded
to a certain class, at the expense of others.
In 1839, those who were directly invoked by Arago’s “you” had
already been responsible for large-scale disasters that included geno-
cides, sociocides, and culturcides in Africa, India, the Americas and the
Caribbean Islands, for naturalizing and legalizing these acts through
international institutions and laws and for instituting their right to
continue to dominate others’ worlds. At that point, the universal
addressee implied by Arago’s “everybody” and “everyone” is fictitious
because those who were its universal addressees could not come into
being without dissecting, bracketing, and sanctioning others’ expe-
rience of violence. The violence of forcing everything to be shown
and exhibited to the gaze is denied when the right in question is only
the right to see. If the right not to exhibit everything is respected, the
right to see that endows “everybody” with unlimited access to what is
in the world cannot be founded. Thus, extending the right to see so as
to render “everybody” a true universal is not possible without perpe-
trating further violence. The idea of a universal right to see is a fraud.
When photography emerged, it didn’t halt this process of plunder that
made others and others’ worlds available to some, but rather acceler-
ated it and provided further opportunities to pursue it. In this way the
camera shutter developed as an imperial technology.
In a split second, the camera’s shutter draws three dividing lines:
in time (between a before and an after), in space (between who/what
is in front of the camera and who/what is behind it), and in the body
politic (between those who possess and operate such devices and
appropriate and accumulate their product and those whose counte-
nance, resources, or labor are extracted). The work of the shutter is
not an isolated operation, nor is it restricted only to photography. If
shutters in the service of petty sovereigns were limited only to cameras
and were not operative in other domains—wherein the violence
6 Potential History
3 See Sandi Doughton, “Rep. Jayapal Meets 174 Asylum-Seeking Women, Many
of Them Separated from Their Children, at SeaTac Prison,” Seattle Times, June 9, 2018.
Unlearning Imperialism 7
4 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 108.
10 Potential History
through which the very structures can be undone that articulate vio-
lence as firm data and fixed memory. Unlearning imperialism means
unlearning what one’s ancestors inherited from their ancestors, and
them from theirs, as solid facts and recognizable signposts, in order
to attend to their origins and render imperial plunder impossible
once again.
Aïsha
More than a decade ago, when I started the research for this book, I
could not anticipate that the nothingness that I know about the Alge-
rian origin of my father would one day have a proper name. Some
years ago, already deep into the writing of this book, I came to know
this proper name—Aïsha—and adopted it, making it mine. This was
the name of my father’s mother, my grandmother, which he never
passed down to us, his daughters and grandchildren. His mother’s
name at home was always “grandma,” which as a child seemed to me
a proper name. I discovered Aïsha as my grandmother’s name only
after my father’s death, when I looked at his birth certificate. I was
all too familiar with my father’s overt and covert practices of passing
for a French.5 When I first interpreted his action in relation to us, his
children and grandchildren, I ignored the meaning of his action in
relation to his ancestors. It took me some time before I could recog-
nize that it was more than just a name, that my grandmother insisted
and my father gave up on adherence to a name that the whole family
was encouraged not to carry when they had been invited to become
French citizens, in other words, to give away part of their Arabness.
By concealing this name from us, my father betrayed his ancestors. He
acted like the male-patriotic Roman citizens in David’s painting, The
Oath of the Oratii (in which French revolutionaries would recognize
themselves shortly after the 1784 painting was completed), turning
his back to the family and siding with the patriotic colonizers who
were busy destroying the family’s precolonial world, a world that my
grandmother’s name still evokes.
By not letting the name go—by rejecting my father’s legacy for the
as long as he lived, but the secret was revealed soon after his death. I
have experienced this discovery—the epiphany of an Arab name in the
midst of a Jewish-Israeli and Hebrew-speaking family—as a treasure.
I have celebrated the presence of this unruly name as an invaluable
relic from a different pre-imperial world, which has inspired this book
from the moment I discovered it. With it my anti-imperial commit-
ment became one with a pre-imperial aspiration that existed prior to
the moment when thousands of Algerian Jews were invited or forced
to understand their Jewishness as irreconcilable with their Arab and
Algerian existence and had to alienate themselves from the world they
once shared with their Muslim neighbors.
Embracing Aïsha as my name is an attempt to hold on to the poten-
tial preserved in it, a potential that survived a long history, from before
the Crémieux decree (1872) to the present form of Zionism and the
Israeli state. It is an attempt to reverse the command to posit one’s
Jewish identity in absolute opposition to one’s Arabness. For, after all,
the Crémieux decree was a French imperial act, which did not simply
grant citizenship to one distinct group of non-Muslim Algerians (as
it is often described) but started the work, which the Zionists later
sought to complete, to make Algerian Jews into such a group of non-
Arab, semi-European, and second-grade French citizens. The decree
was world-destroying, setting some groups apart from the general
colonized population and against constitutive elements of their
own identity. From my Aïsha’s eyes, the imperial destruction of the
commons in Palestine was exercised in a similar manner: a reiteration
of a similar enterprise pursued a few decades earlier, westward along
the southern Mediterranean shore.
others) is not bounded by care for existing worlds but is rather moti-
vated by the desire to craft new ones. Skills of destruction, packaged
as vision, discovery, and innovation, are made into growing fields of
expertise. The celebratory narratives of modern citizenship conceal
its role in the destruction of worlds and their modes of caring and
sharing, wherein those who were made noncitizens dwelled and
were doomed to aspire to become citizens, that is, imperial citizens.
Unlearning is a way to rewind the progressive history of imperial cit-
izenship granted to people in stages along the “advancement in the
civilizing process.”7 Within this paradigm, Jews, women, and people
of color, are considered living proof that there is progress in the world,
having finally attained—or having been provided with—the status,
though not the actual situation, of full citizens. What is offhandedly
omitted from this narrative are the phases of world destruction, dis-
possession, deprivation, and subjugation that precede any prospective
emancipation “offered” to those who have been given imperial citi-
zenship. To rewind this history is to insist on the existence of different
patterns and incommensurable modalities of citizenship experienced
prior to colonization by different groups and peoples who shared their
world as cocitizens of different sorts in the societies in which they
lived. Such a movement is to embrace this incommensurability as a
common ground upon which imperial citizenship cannot be assumed
to embody the invariable model against which other modalities are
evaluated.
Imperial citizenship needs a past. The role of institutions such as
archives and museums in the “preservation” of the past is the effect
of a vast enterprise of destruction conducted at the expense of and as
a substitute for destroyed worlds. Fueled and justified by the pursuit
of the new, what is destroyed is produced as past and elaborate pro-
cedures of salvage and preservation are devoted to extract and study
cherished samples as proof of bygone times and their own progress.
The “past” consists of discrete objects, documents, and relics detached
from what were or could have been the sustainable worlds of which
they were part, and whose destruction is often justified for the sake
of their rescue. If what they preserve is extracted from living worlds,
and if living worlds are producing objects whose destination is the
A Nonprogressive Study
The imperial movement of progress did not hit all places at once, and
what it brought about was not progress but rather the destructive
movement itself, the unstoppable force whose expansion destroys,
unstoppably, because stopping it had become sacrilegious. The
movement of progress, as Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, is a mode of terror: “This movement, proceeding
according to its own law, cannot in the long run be hindered; eventu-
ally its force will always prove more powerful than the most powerful
forces engendered by the actions and the will of men.”8 This unstoppa-
ble movement that traverses us is the movement that I aim to unlearn
in this book , putting myself in the company of others.
Unlearning is a commitment to think against and prior to imperial-
ism without forgetting, even for a moment, to what extent imperialism
conditions us and invites us to act as its agents. It is acknowledging
imperial violence as a given condition yet endeavoring to think before
it. By seeking new modes of opposing imperialism, we risk acting
as promoters of its progressive campaign for the new and relate to
allies who preceded us as “not radical enough” in criticizing it, finding
ourselves again as too few to withdraw from recognizing it as a con-
dition. Unlearning imperialism is asking not how it could be opposed
tomorrow but rather how was it opposed yesterday, and before yester-
day, such that the fragmented many can stand together outside of the
The pursuit of the new plays a crucial role in enabling imperial violence
to be experienced and perceived as a given condition, irreversible.
11 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control, October 59, 1992, 3–7.
12 Simone Browne, Dark Matters—On the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke Uni-
versity Press: Durham, 2015.
13 Foucault, “Panopticism.”
14 Hilary McD. Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt—Reparations for Caribbean Slavery
and Native Genocide, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2013, 20.
Unlearning Imperialism 23
(and extra care for their expropriated objects) now seen as worldless
and available for enslavement, exploitation, rape, dispossession. This
is epitomized in the conjuncture of events in 1492, when the mass
expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain performed a large-scale
manufacture of a body politic and generated “abandoned” property
that was confiscated in order to fund Columbus’s second journey to
the “new world.”19
Acknowledging destruction as this movement’s recurrent and
generative principle is necessary in order to avoid the trap of prog-
ress narratives—the only way to study this movement without being
fully conditioned by it. Thus, I propose to study discrete, different,
and unrelated events separated from each other by hundreds of years
as instantiations of the same monotone movement of the imperial
shutter: the destruction of the Taínos’s cultural and political forma-
tions in 1514; the destruction of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system
of the Igabo people (prior to the multiple campaigns of destruction
that started with the Portuguese as early as the fifteenth century); the
destruction of Judeo-Arab culture in Spain, and later in Algeria with
the Crémieux Decree in 1872 that declared the Jews French citizens
against their fellow cocitizens; and the destruction of Palestinian cul-
tural and political formations in 1948 and beyond.
Moreover, the destruction of cultures was not delimited to the non-
European; once European imperial agents were mobilized to destroy
cultures, their own was necessarily impacted and already in the process
of being destroyed. The destruction of non-European cultures, which
enriched Europe, also destroyed many diverse formations in Europe
that could not and were not allowed to survive the command of “prog-
ress.” Here is one example, reconstructed with the grain, from a legal
document discussed by Hilary Beckles, and another, reconstructed
“against the grain” by Silvia Federici as constitutive of the propagation
of imperialism. In pursuit of “criminal enrichment,” or the “branding
of persons as chattel,” European countries had to introduce a “moral
and legal break from any African or European tradition of labor,” that
is, to let their traditions also be destroyed and supplanted by new ones
that often undermined their ground.20 This can be illustrated in the
19 See David Raphael, ed., The Expulsion: 1492 Chronicles, 2d ed., Valley Village,
CA: Carmi House Press, 1992.
20 Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, 19.
26 Potential History
Barbados Act of 1661, titled “An Act for the Better Ordering and Gov-
erning of Negroes,” in which this break is formulated and justified in
terms of the existing British legal system’s insufficiency: “there being
in all the body of that Law no track to guide us where to walk nor any
rule set us how to govern such Slaves.”21
Inseparable from the destruction of European legal formations
that made slavery possible, Federici unlearns the European histori-
cal narrative of a smooth transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Such a seamless narrative performs a second massacre of the hun-
dreds of thousands of women who were persecuted as part of the
purification of Europe from women’s structures of transmission of
knowledge and know-how, under the campaign known as a “witch
hunt.”22 This double massacre doomed to oblivion the legacy of
non-and pre-imperial competing political, cultural, and economic
formations that could defeat feudalism, “threatened to shipwreck the
emerging capitalist economy,” and thus materialize in its place. “In
response to this crisis,” Federici writes, “the European ruling class
launched a global offensive, laying the foundations of a capitalist
world-system in the relentless attempt to appropriate new sources of
wealth, expand its economic basis and bring new workers under its
command.”23
When destruction is understood as a principle, unlearning it is not
only siding with others who suffered from white grandeur more than
others and advocating for their cause, it is also claiming and reclaiming
pre-imperial and nondestructive modes of sharing the world, which
were then also made inaccessible to descendants of white Europe-
ans who could have claimed them as part of their own pre-imperial
heritage. Wherever the imperial forces of progress hit, they imposed
new political institutions and practices, through the destruction of
ecological, economic, social, cultural, moral, and political norms and
systems of knowledge and through the normalization not only of the
newly imposed procedures, but of the need to constantly and infinitely
invent more of the new to justify the destruction of what exists.
21 “An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes” [Barbados Act],
1661, in Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette, eds., Slavery,
New York: Oxford Readers: 2001.
22 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accu-
mulation, New York: Autonomedia, 2004, 164.
23 Ibid., 62.
Unlearning Imperialism 27
24 See Robin Walker, When We Ruled, Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2011.
28 Potential History
25 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or
Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by himself, 1789 [facsimile edition, no publisher
listed], xx.
26 See for example Hautey’s speech quoted in de Las Casas, 2003.
Unlearning Imperialism 29
leave their imprint on the world that imperial forces “found.” Tempting
as it may be for the subject who seeks to morally denounce impe-
rial plunders and destruction, the amplification of imperial violence
comes necessarily at the expense of a salient account of its victims’
worldliness, articulated in the plurality and variety of their modes of
engagement with the world. Potential history, as can be reconstructed
from Richard Wright, starts when two axes are combined: “We stole
words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Land, who did not
want us to know too many of them or their meaning.”27 Similarly,
accounts of art, archives, or architecture in Congo in the beginning of
the twentieth century, or in Palestine in the late 1940s, should refrain
from relating to them as completely looted or destroyed, and from
reiterating the imperial judgments of experts who state that the “best
samples” of non-Western material culture are already in the posses-
sion of Western institutions, and the rest of it is fake. After all, such
well-entrenched traditions, from which Western museums enriched
themselves, do not vanish into a limbo, as Carl Anthony wrote in rela-
tion to African traditions of building.28
I propose to shift the discussion of worldlessness from its associa-
tion with the state of the enslaved or refugees (expellees) to the imperial
enterprise and to study the ways that imperial practices, institutions,
and legal, political, and cultural languages deny groups’ incessant
engagement with the world as a way of racializing and thus depriving
them of their share in different common worlds. In a continuation
of Sadri Khiari’s argument about race as a social relation—“similarly
to the way capital produces classes, patriarchy produces genders, the
global European colonialism produces races”29—I propose to see in
the regime of museums and archives, in charge of the administration
of objects and access to them, a major force of racialization and hence
world destruction.
It is with the help of different companions that I propose to pay
attention to the vernaculars that convey efforts to survive within the
new worlds that they were forced to inhabit. I propose to relate to these
27 Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices, New York: Basic Books, 2008, 40.
28 Carl Anthony, “The Big House and the Slave Quarters: African Contributions
to the New World,” in Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscape of North
American Slavery, eds. Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2010, 177–92.
29 Sadri Khiari, Le contre-révolution colonial en France, Paris: La Fabrique, 2009.
30 Potential History
idioms as still open political claims and to let them transform schol-
arship from the language of discovery and reinvention to the language
of continuance, renewal, and repair. Thus, for example, rather than
studying looted sculptures from Congo, Syria, or Palestine as if their
presence in the museum—ready for the gaze and scrutiny of the art
historian—is given (and thereby accepting the “neutral” procedures
of the discipline as the framework that defines these objects’ modes of
existence), with my companions these sculptures are approached as if
they still belonged to the communities from which they were expro-
priated. While these items, now on display mainly inside Western
white museal cubes, are considered works of art, I relate to them as
objects in which the rights of violated communities are inscribed. This
is part of my argument that objects and documents are not what we
have been socialized and trained to see: standalone artifacts whose
inscribed content exists for experts to interpret. Rather, they consti-
tute part of the material worlds out of which people’s rights are made
manifest.
30 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider – Essays and Speeches, New York: Crossing Press
Feminist Series, 2007, 112; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/
Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argu-
ment,” The New Centennial Review, 3: 3, 2003.
31 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 460.
32 Potential History
32 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1998, 9.
33 Ibid., 7.
Unlearning Imperialism 33
ones); and they are not all productive (and when they are, their prod-
ucts are of different types). Prior to imperialism, the human condition
came under pressure from various political formations, but never with
the same intensity, and never in the context of an organized global
project whose goal was to destroy it and to replace both it and its world
with totally different conditions, as imperialism and racial capitalism
have done since the fifteenth century.
and define their own practices and rules. It forced out many political
idioms outside the official institutions and academic disciplines, pre-
venting them from being spoken in places where people assembled in
order to collaborate and act together, with and not only against others.
The outpost status of the new world entailed more than territorial
distance. With the “new world,” a political principle of differentiality
was invented. People started to be governed differentially from others,
by other people whose rights were inscribed in worlds that the gov-
erned were forced to build and within which they were denied the
right to feel at home. When imperial actors granted themselves citi-
zenship, they continued to protect their privileges and inscribe their
accumulation in different objects, institutions, and practices, thus
multiplying the number of groups governed differentially. In between
Europe and its offshore outposts, a new template for political regimes
emerged early on—one based on a differential body politic. The need
to preserve the principle outlasted any attempt to alter its local man-
ifestations and to change here and there the status of small groups
within populations or individuals among them. Thus, for example, in
1801, without alluding to the serious threat that could finally bring the
system of slavery to its end, John Poyer, the white Barbadian historian,
emphasized the need to preserve the differentiation on which every
“well constituted society” is built:
38 Bonnie Honig, “The President’s House Is Empty,” Boston Review, January 19,
2017, bostonreview.net.
38 Potential History
Learning to Rewind
Archival Technology
Potential History
Potential history is a form of being with others, both living and dead,
across time, against the separation of the past from the present, col-
onized peoples from their worlds and possessions, and history from
politics. In this space wherein violence ought to be reversed, different
options that were once eliminated are reactivated as a way of slowing
the imperial movement of progress. Potential history questions the
inherent universal value of archival records that supersedes local lit-
igation about the mode of their acquisition and rejects endorsing the
archive’s mission of sanctioning people’s actions as now records of
past achievements that cannot be rewound. It is out of this conflict
between people’s worldly active life and the imperially conditioned
record of operative actions pursued in the service of progress that
potential history unfolds. Potential history is not the account of radical
thinking, of explicit ideological struggles against imperialism, but a
rejection of imperialism’s conceptual apparatus altogether. The impe-
rial apparatus presumes that such struggles exist only in the past, only
as dusty records in the archive.
Rehearsals of disengagement from the frenetic pursuit of the new
are necessary if one seeks to see beyond the slicing of time into past,
present, and future and to relate to actions classified as outdated and
impracticable as concrete, common options. Rehearsing disengage-
ment is the practice of doing potential history. Rehearsals begin by
44 Potential History
Such options were identified with the enemies of the state, who were
differentially included in the body politic and construed as dangers to
sovereignty. Since it opposed monarchy, the sovereign formation that
emerged through the violence of the eighteenth-century revolutions
was called popular. Speaking in the name of “the people” (demos), even
though “the people” consisted of a minority of the governed popula-
tion, made it possible to render other, nondifferential formations of
the body politic into predemocratic, backward, and outmoded polit-
ical forms. The process of unlearning the imperial identification of
the idiom “the people”—a minority of white males endowed with the
status and privilege of citizens—is far from being completed, as I show
in my reading of contemporary political theorists.
The colonization of “the people” is not just another tale about
eighteenth-century nationalism. Studying an example of worldly sov-
ereignty that I draw from 1947 Palestine, I show that right after the UN
partition resolution was announced, a violent coup was unleashed by
Jewish military and political leaders who ignored the local population
and its mode of engagement with the existing world and engineered
a new body politic by removing Palestinians and moving migrant
Jews to populate the emptied places. This violence was part of a larger
economy of violence that forced all the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine
to comply with the new order and identify themselves with the new
entity (as “Israeli”) at the expense of their existing cultural, commu-
nal, and spiritual engagements. The coup leaders were met with civil
resistance mounted all over Palestine by both Arabs and Jews. The
resistance lasted several months, during which at least 100 local civil
alliances between the neighboring Jewish and Arab communities were
established. Rather than assuming that Arabs and Jews represent two
sides of a long-lasting conflict, I show that violence was used in order
to fabricate and separate the two sides, and stabilize their relations in
the form of an everlasting duel, “a conflict,” thus erasing and belittling
the different modes of opposition to the constitution of Jewish sover-
eignty. Rather than examining the plight of Palestinians as an isolated
event, I study it as part of the economy of deprivations and privileges
constituted by the establishment of the regime and preserved through
its reproduction. In this context I show that one of the major rights
violated by imperial sovereignties is the right not to become a perpe-
trator, that is, the right not to act as a privileged citizen who complies
with or acquiesces to the differential sovereignty from which she or he
Unlearning Imperialism 49
Citizen-Perpetrators
of the Third World’s cultural assets while denying their own implica-
tion in the holding and study of others’ culture. Paradigmatic is the
UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Prevent-
ing the Illicit Import, Export and Transport of Ownership of Cultural
Property, that respond to contemporary looting, thus naturalizing the
presence of millions of objects stolen during centuries of imperial rule.
Citizens may take pride in sympathizing with the suffering of
others, and they expect their fellow citizens and government officials
to be moved in the same way. Yet when imperialism is unlearned, we
see how inextricable their citizenship and its modalities of respon-
sibility, concern, and morality in general are from the naturalized
noncitizenship imposed on others.
As I noted above, under the imperial condition, no originary
moment of moral decision precedes the moment in which one becomes
a perpetrator. Complicity is part of being governed in a regime based
on differential rule. In the course of a few centuries, the imperial
enterprise of differential rule has become a transcendental condition
of politics. Partaking in its preservation is the citizen’s duty or task,
the stakes of which can rarely be questioned. Being a citizen means
taking part in imperial enterprises, participating in their crimes, and
acting on their behalf without crossing a threshold where a decision of
whether to collaborate in this or that abusive project needs be made.
This substance of imperial citizenship—the scripted readiness of citi-
zens to inhabit their given roles in the theaters of political regimes, as
well as the difficulties of extricating themselves from them—are absent
from discussions of citizenship in political theory. Occasionally, citi-
zens compensate for being deprived of such decisions when it is most
important—before they are implicated in the abuse of others—and, as
individual political actors, they express a belated awareness of their
deeds as on-duty soldiers, civil clerks, architects, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, or simply citizens.
Undoing the celebratory narrative of citizens as sovereign subjects
requires studying their fabrication as inextricable from the fabrication
of noncitizens. Situated in the globally fabricated and governmen-
tally engineered political field, this book depicts citizens as one of
many governed classes—slaves, stateless, undocumented workers,
and so forth—which partake in the governance of others through the
technology of the archive. For citizens to be relegated to a position
of exteriority and to a temporality of “post-ness” in which they are
Unlearning Imperialism 51
Regime-Made Disaster
life of others outside the polis was the condition of freedom inside the
polis. In this realm, statesmen, and subsequently citizens, rarely dis-
sociated themselves from the enterprise of preserving the differential
body politic but did not directly engage in it, either. The differential
body politic is an outcome achieved through the use of different tools
and did not exist as an end in itself. If it had, today’s accepted political
concepts could not continue to be discussed separately from the vio-
lence required to institute the corresponding realities. In the course of
endless encounters between promoters of new worlds—entrepreneurs,
settlers, reformists—and native populations that lived in those worlds
but paradoxically stood for the old world that was to be reshaped, dif-
ferential body politics were constituted by sovereign nation-states that
comprised outpost territories as key elements of their genetic codes.
As actors who were born into a world where the creation and prolifer-
ation of new states seem more like the completion of a desired process
than the perpetuation of a disastrous political condition, citizens are
often oblivious to their own mobilization in the name of progress,
whose devoted agents they have become.
For imperial disasters to be reproduced as regime-made, the “dis-
covery” of distant territories and the persona of the “discoverer” had
to be reproduced in and through different domains of knowledge in
which the discoverer’s status, authority, and legitimacy could not be
recognized as an infringement of the rights of people inscribed in these
discovered places nor as violation of the common, which should not
have been made appropriable in the first place. Calling attention to the
centrality of the persona of the discoverer and its homologues in the
quest for knowledge—the inquisitive mind, the art connoisseur, the
philosopher—is key for locating the origins of modern citizenship in
the imperial enterprise of plundering others’ worlds. These personas’
actions are performed through the invention of imperial rights—the
right to discover, uncover, penetrate, scrutinize, copy, and appropriate
—thus erasing (like the operation of the shutter) how appropriated
objects (which made up the center of gravity of universal rights) were
in fact plundered and in effect how the discoverer violated others’
rights. As lands, objects, sovereignties, and rights are studied together,
the discovery of “African art,” for example, by artists, art historians,
and curators is not interpreted as the appropriation by individuals of
individual objects, but rather as the institutionalization of a series of
differences, such as between those who are capable of such discoveries
54 Potential History
and are authorized to name them, and those who may be discovered,
or worse, be neglected or relegated to a bygone past. While universal
rights enable the moderate extension of these rights to others in a way
that makes a certain mobility and inclusion of diverse actors possi-
ble, the accumulation of differences throughout half a millennium is
left almost untouched, and its institutionalized form continues to be
reproduced and to impact the scope of the different actors and how
they can act and interact with each other.
Performing Rights
43 Abraham Johnstone, “Address to the People of Color,” in Lift Every Voice:
African American Oratory 1787–1900, eds. Philip S. Foner and Robert Branham, Tus-
caloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998, 54.
56 Potential History
be changed with this destructive call for the impossible in the form of
a new beginning, which is part and parcel of the same imperial license;
instead, it is the threshold of unbearability that should be restored and
used in order to cry out, “not everything should be possible!” Based
on the recovery of numerous incidents where people struggled against
the violation of such thresholds, this book restores a different promise
in the form of a barricade—the promise of saying no to progress. No,
this is not possible is the cry people utter everywhere against those who
acted as though nothing should limit them. Since innumerable abuses
were waged against the human condition, the wheel should be turned
back to rewind these violations and render them impossible again. To
counter the imperial promise of a new beginning promoted through
the three-dimensional imperial principle that constantly threatens the
commons, this book is tuned to a different modality: that of rehearsal,
reversal, rewinding, repairing, renewing, reacquiring, redistributing,
readjusting, reallocating, and on and on.
To rewind is not to return to an idyllic moment in the past, but
rather to refuse to recognize in the violent outcomes of imperialism
the archival acceptability of its violence or to validate the separation
of people from their objects and the material environment in which
their place is carved. In my discussion of rights, I relate to objects as
proof of one’s place in the world, as delegates of people’s worlds in the
new formations into which they were forcibly integrated, and as the
grounds out of which the commons and a shared political existence
can be reconfigured. The constituent violence that Benjamin asso-
ciated with sovereign regimes is only part of the story of imperial
violence. Its other part is “institutional” and “procedural” (or “proce-
duent”) violence, whereby seemingly neutral procedures are imposed
and serve to outlaw competing options in each and every domain,
from art to politics, and to justify their violent repression and dis-
persion. Processes of rewinding are not an idiosyncratic academic
invention but rather an account of calls, claims, projects, and forma-
tions that people have performed worldwide since the very beginning
of imperialism.
Writing potential history is an attempt to undo the triple divid-
ing line and relate to these performances not as belated responses to
already accomplished imperial formations but rather as simultane-
ous competing options; not as coming from the outside of the inner
space of the polity but rather from its core; and not as emanating only
Unlearning Imperialism 57
from the victims who claim their due, as if citizens can be no more
than potential respondents to them. Thus, I conclude that calls for
reversal, restitution, or reparations are an inseparable part of a politi-
cal ontology no less than violence is. Imagined, claimed, and enacted
simultaneously by all those who are implicated in imperial violence—
victims and perpetrators alike as cocitizens—potential history is the
transformation of violence into shared care for our common world.