Ariella Azoulay

Ariella Azoulay (אריאלה אזולאי; born Tel Aviv, 1962) is an Israeli author, art curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture.

She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University and an independent curator of Archives and Exhibitions.

In 1999 she began teaching at Bar-Ilan University.

She received the Igor Zabel Award, in 2010, for the exhibition Untaken Photographs.

Azoulay has degrees from Université Paris VIII, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Tel Aviv University.

Azoulay is of Algerian descent and identifies as "an Arab Jew and a Palestinian Jew of African origins".

In 2010 Azoulay was denied tenure at Bar-Ilan, a move regarded by some colleagues and commentators as politically motivated.

In 2010 she was the Gladstein Visiting professor at the Human Rights Center of the University of Connecticut.

In 2011 she was Leverhulme Research Professor at Durham University, and she is currently assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.

Her partner, with whom she has also co-authored written work, is the philosopher Adi Ophir.

Throughout her career, Azoulay developed concepts and approaches around the reversal of imperial violence.

The theoretical framework she proposed have far-reaching implications in a number of knowledge fields, such as political theory, archival science, visual and photography studies.

In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay studies historical objects (from photographs to documents) belonging to archives and museum collections.

In her opinion, the museums must be de-imperialized, as well as the discipline of history itself.

She suggests a methodology and an ethics for engaging with historical and archival materials that allows the historical present discussion to come forward; refusing to relegate these materials to a foreclosed past.

In her words:

"'Our approach to the archive cannot be guided by the imperial desire to unearth unknown ‘hidden’ moments (...) It should rather be driven by the conviction that other political species were and continue to be real options in our present.'"

Azoulay invites both the scholar and the public to see the imminent potential in such objects for fostering nonimperial forms of identification and meaning.

In her perspective, the archive is not only a repository of documents but a regime of procedures interwoven with imperialist dogmas.

Therefore, the Potential History is an ongoing process of revising these dogmas, through ontology and epistemology.

In other words, this kind of history writing should question both the nature of things and the way one understand them.

This discussion relates to decolonial theories.

Furthermore, Azoulay notes how the decolonization of museums is not possible without the decolonization of the world itself.

The following is available in English translation: