Archive of Civil Imagination

Verso editor Jessie Kindig on editing Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, part of a roundtable of responses to Potential History.

Zoë Druick asks if documentary films can escape their imperial past, part of the Verso roundtable "Unlearning Imperialism" considering the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

Artist and scholar Paula Gaetano Adi asks: can we consider robots as comrades? Can we imagine robots going on strike against their own instrumentation? Part of the larger Verso roundtable on "Unlearning Imperialism."

Historian of science Lukas Rieppel considers the connections between geology, prehistory, and imperialism, as part of the "Unlearning Imperialism" Verso roundtable.

Archaeologist Yannis Hamilakis on the connections between photography and archaeology, and our haunted present. Part of the Verso roundtable "Unlearning Imperialism," considering the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

Historian Vazira Zamindar asks if history has the disciplinary tools to practice repair, part of the Verso roundtable "Unlearning Imperialism" considering the work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

Our selected Film and Media reading for the academic year ahead: all 40% off until the end of September.

In an open letter to theorist Sylvia Wynter on Wynter's text "1492: A New World View," Ariella Aïsha Azoulay  retrieves memories of her Jewish family's Arabness: "I refuse to become a memory-less Jew, whose life was mutated and reformatted to begin only with the creation of the nation-state."

The millions whose photographs are taken are not referred to in the histories and theories of photography. From an early stage, it was assumed that the people photographed provided the resources and the cheap or free labor for the large-scale photographic enterprise. In this fourth part of the Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography series, Ariella Azoulay looks at photographers as cultural agents of imperialism.