Keynote Speakers - CONVIVIAL CULTURES | XI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture - Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

MODERNITY IS AN IMPERIAL CRIME

Abstract

The pursuit of the new plays a crucial role in enabling imperial violence to be experienced and perceived as a given condition, irreversible. The new is not just a descriptive designation; rather, it wields force as an accelerator of violence, constitutive of its naturalization and essential to its power to continuously “discover” new worlds and areas of exploration, thus turned into a store of resources ready to be exploited. The question is how to rupture, stop, and retroactively reverse the category of the “new” that seems to have survived intact, coeval with the real, and how to undo its facticity in and through research, scholarship, and other forms of intervention. Potential history and Errata are attempts to unlearn 1492 as history, as a distant point in a linear timeline from which things have followed as they should have.

Biography

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, film essayist, and curator of archives and exhibitions.

Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019); Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012); The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011).

Her potential histories, archives, and curatorial work were shown in different places: Errata (Tapiès Foundation, 2019, HKW, Berlin, 2020), Enough! The Natural Violence of New World Order (F/Stop photography festival, Leipzig, 2016), Act of State 1967-2007 (Centre Pompidou, 2016, Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa Fotografico, 2020); "The Natural History of Rape" (Pembroke Hall, Brown University, 2015); The Body Politic [in Really Useful Knowledge, curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW], Reina Sofia, Madrid; When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea, Exhibition Room - Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices No 16 Potential History (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Leuven), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art).

Among her film-essays: Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019); Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012); I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004) and The Food Chain (2004).