She casts a critical eye on novelty, at least insofar as it is thought to provide the key to modern narratives of progress. There is an irony here, because Azoulay is deeply suspicious of the category of ‘the new’. Although pedagogical concerns are not an explicit part of Potential History, thinking about the institutional norms that govern learning provide a useful example of how imperialism conditions us to think and act, for both mastery and progress are key concepts of imperialism, according to Azoulay. Azoulay writes that what motivated her to write this book was her attempt to unlearn her Israeli identity in order to imagine what it might have meant to have been an Algerian or Palestinian Jew (pp. The task of learning something in order to unlearn it is paradoxical, but it is also difficult because those of us in academia have been conditioned to strive for mastery: we must demonstrate mastery of a subject before we can progress, and this is how education typically works from the earlier grades up through graduate school. We must learn how imperialism has made us who we are if we are to have any hope of unlearning it. Unlearning imperialism is a paradoxical task because we must first learn how imperialism works by rendering its working explicit so that we might unlearn it. According to Azoulay, an initial problem with unlearning imperialism is that for most of us, our thinking and acting-indeed, our very being-in-the-world-is conditioned by imperialism. This book demands that readers undertake the paradoxical and difficult task of unlearning something that has become a pervasive feature of their lives, namely imperialism. As an effort to draw attention to the African artifacts still housed in French museums, Diyabanza’s actions are very much in the spirit of Ariella Azoulay’s Potential History. Diyabanza’s goal was not really to steal the artifacts instead, he livestreamed each of the attempted thefts in an effort to draw attention to the vast number of African artifacts that remain in European collections, despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s assurances in 2017 that the vast majority of them would be returned.
The most recent charges stem from a visit to the Quai Branly Museum as well as an earlier visit to the Museum of African, Oceanic, and Native American Arts, in which Diyabanza allegedly sought to repatriate artifacts that he claims had been looted by French colonial authorities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On 21 September 2020, the New York Times reported that Congolese Pan-African activist Mwazulu Diyabanza was scheduled to appear in a Paris courtroom to answer charges of attempting to steal artifacts from French museum collections.
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