Paula Gaetano Adi imagines robots going on strike Lukas Rieppelon geology, deep time, and “potential prehistory” Yannis Hamilakis on archaeology and material artifacts Vazira Zamindar asks if history has the disciplinary tools to practice repair

In this roundtable are responses to the book by a historian, a media studies scholar, an archaeologist, an artist, and the book’s editor, as each take the book to task, turning its pages to reflect and incite, or simply deliberate on the unruly practice of our distinct crafts that the book invites us to engage. More than two years on, in the middle of a forever-pandemic, political polarization, and climate disaster, the urgent call to access history’s revolutionary potential and rebuild a collective world of care seems even more acute. This week, Verso is happy to publish some responses following from the conference as an online roundtable. Above all, panelists asked: what can a radical practice of history look like?

Vazira Zamindar and Yannis Hamilakis, panelists and audience members talked animatedly about imperial knowledge, history, art, and the possibility of repairing devastated worlds. We didn’t know it then, but it was the last large, freewheeling discussion any of us would attend for the next several years.Ĭonvened by Profs. Just before the first of the pandemic lockdown regulations went into effect in the US, when commuter trains were running eerily half-empty, a conference was held at Brown University to discuss Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s powerful and provocative new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism.

Ariella azoulay unlearning imperialism