Para una "abajoeducación": Azoulay y la apuesta por desaprender la historia
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, autora, artista y teórica de la fotografía y la cultura visual, fue entrevistada por Brad Evans para su serie "Histories of Violence". El título de la entrevista es "Unlearning History" en referencia a la más reciente publicación de Azoulay: Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019).
En contra del proyecto imperial que inició a finales del siglo XV, del cual la historia se volvió uno de sus mecanismos de reproducción más poderosos, Azoulay presenta su "historia potencial" como un esfuerzo por relacionarse de manera distinta a lo que ha sido hecho pasado y para actuar en común con quienes han rechazado el despojo forzado del mundo desde 1492. Empujando los límites disciplinares desde distintas orillas, así se refiere Azoulay a la historia potencial:
Potential history is an attempt to disable the power of political concepts, institutions, and practices that relegate people’s lived experience to the past, and to engage with these concepts not as given categories but as subject to people’s actions, aspirations, promises. Potential history is the insistence that though people failed to stop imperialism’s imposition in various places and moments, it doesn’t mean that their rights — or ours — to still oppose it are gone forever.
A lo que es sin duda un desafío monumental a los presupuestos fundamentales de la historiografía occidental, Azoulay le suma un proyecto pedagógico que está ya sugerido en el título de la entrevista y de su libro: el de desaprender el imperialismo y la historia que ha sido hecha historia por y para el despojo. Haciendo referencia al trabajo de Fred Moten y Stefano Harney (Los abajocomunes), Azoulay llama a este proyecto una "abajoeducación" (undereducation) que, conectando diferentes tiempos y alejándose de los tres principios de la historia imperial (temporalidad lineal; las fuentes; lo "nuevo"), insista en la necesidad de un proyecto ético-político anti y no-imperial en la disputa por reclamar el sentido [de lo] común.
La fuerza con la que aparecen los posibles cruces del trabajo de la profesora Azoulay con un proyecto educativo decolonial y decolonizador hace necesario que se examinen con mayor atención y profundidad. Esa será una tarea para después, pero por ahora dejo aquí registrada la parte de la entrevista a la que será imperativo volver:
BRAD EVANS: In conclusion, I’d like to turn our attention to younger children who have perhaps yet to learn the types of history that you compellingly show to be shrouded in the blood of imperial rule. Alongside our attempts to unlearn the past, how might educators rethink what is taught moving forward, especially when it comes to pedagogies of violence and peace for the young?
ARIELLA AÏSHA AZOULAY: We have to be clear about it — it is not history that is shrouded in the blood of imperial rule, that is an abstraction. We are talking about people, many of them children, who are targeted and murdered by imperial regimes. Let me first unpack this leap from children to students. Imperial rule devours children and pits them against their ancestors, to make them even less protected in this world; this is part of the invention of the past. Under imperial rule, children’s bodies and minds are kidnapped en masse, and many of them are prevented from becoming students, kept from studying and reading and writing. Kidnapping is a constitutive part of witch-hunting, slavery, racial capitalism, adoption, orphanage, forced migration, border control, human trafficking, pedophilia, and overseas markets. Compared to all these operations, education provides a more protective environment. However, most of the curriculum in most education systems, is meant to produce good citizens — meaning docile in regard to oppressive states and markets. So children’s minds are kidnapped from learning to rebel. Their minds are also kidnapped into imperial ways of thinking. For children who have access to education in capitalist regimes known as democracies, concepts of history and progress are central to the curriculum. They learn that their ancestors belong to the past, and that they themselves are the future, meaning they have license to continue to destroy the world in the name of progress.
As educators, we must admit that education was shaped as an imperial project, and we have to ask ourselves where our commitments lie. Commitment to an anti- and non-imperial mode of teaching requires offering our students the opportunity to unlearn not the past per se, but the past as a container in which many things — crimes, unruliness, refusal, repair, or other transmissions of knowledge — are being tamed. We need to unlearn the separation of the past, present, future tenses, and unlearn the future as a separate tense and site of progress. We have to help our students generate potential histories of violence, to engage with different objects, people, and events, not as static moments with a “proper place” in imperial timelines but as still occurring over the half millennia of imperial rule. This unlearning is necessary in order to regain confidence in one’s own right to question the naturalization of institutional violence. In the spirit of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s idea of the undercommons, we have to generate undereducation, withdraw from imperial histories, and insist on what is wrong and what is right. We have to insist on our right to redress wrongs along with our ancestors who were harmed, even if these injuries were inflicted years, decades, or centuries ago, if the violence was not brought to an end. Undereducation, conduct by many within and outside of academic institutions, is an attempt to renew the common sense of wrong and right against its institutional rival.
The eight projects displayed in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay ’s exhibition 'Errata' are part of an attempt to intervene in the imperial grammar of photographic archives, to interfere in imperial knowledge printed in books, to unlearn imperial structures such as nation states, borders or status of “undocumented” imposed as fait accompli and to foreground the imperial origins of numerous gestures inherited by scholars, artists, photographers and curators, and used in their practices.
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