[On November 9th, 2017, the CAS/MillerComm Lecture Series hosted the lecture "Potential History of the Archive: The Micro Study of a Macro Institution," given by Ariella Azoulay (Brown University). Below is a response to the lecture from Laura Elizabeth Shea, PhD Candidate in Art History.]

Ariella Azoulay: Potential History of the Archive: The Micro Study of a Macro Institution written by Laura Elizabeth Shea (Art History)

  [caption id="attachment_1779" align="align-left" width="124"] Ariella Azoulay. Source: Mike Cohea/Brown University.[/caption] A “conceptually elegant and actionable” scholar is how Associate Professor and Chair of Art History, Terri Weissman introduced Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University on Wednesday evening in the Knight Auditorium at the Spurlock Museum. This term, actionable, is one used by Azoulay herself in her influential book on visual culture and politics,The Civil Contract of Photography, published in English in 2008. The text theorizes photography as a civil contract among the camera, photographer, photographed, and spectator, a contract which demands an accountability and responsibility from all spectators. Similarly, in her lecture, Azoulay called for researchers to take decisive actions against the allure of the archive. She implored scholars to approach the archive as a place of imperial violence whose objects reveal more about the imperial project than they do about the categories and taxonomies of the people it organizes. She argued the archives must be approached by researchers who are not trapped by the seemingly sacrosanct status of the things it purports to protect and preserve. In the archive, documents of the remote past are sterilized, neutralized, and history is made to seem inevitable through the way material objects are presented and used, and thus, both the archive’s institutional structures and its material objects must be addressed with a sense of high alert, if it is interacted with at all. The material for the talk came from the last chapter of her new manuscript in which she analyzes reparations in various cultural contexts. [caption id="attachment_1780" align="aligncenter" width="306"]The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008. Source: MIT Press.[/caption] Azoulay’s lecture identified and then broke down the trust we put in archives to index, categorize and display documents for us to study, discuss and write about. While she did not identify a particular archive, in her talk she referred to visual documents surrounding the institution of American slavery, specifically prints, drawings, photographs, and maps, a topic which, she said, was influenced by her move to the United States several years ago. The images she chose to show in her presentation were many, and often depicted figures actually using the very kind of papers and documents now stored in the archive. For example, she displayed a print of white, armed slave patrollers, reviewing the documents that were required of black enslaved people upon leaving the plantation where they were forced to live. Azoulay argued that this was not an image of slaves and their lack of mobility, but an image of certain individuals we are supposed to recognize as slaves, who suffer from an unbounded archival violence through which they are forced to bear their identity solely as the category of slave, without a past or history. She proposed that we see the armed slave patrollers as archival guardians, placing the category of ‘slave’ over and above anything else the people appear to be or were. These archival guardians, she continued, rarely act alone, but alongside peers that approve of what they are doing, including, it is presumed, those that have accepted, kept, stored, and protect such documents without recognizing their violence. Imperial archives thus invent the past as a realm where enslaved people are reduced to ahistorical categories or archival tags. This effectively makes neutral the effects of abominable crimes. And, she added, merely writing about and preserving documents does not question the violence they helped to regulate. Additional examples included photographs and maps. Azoulay showed a photograph of multiple sculptures destined for an “African Negro Art” show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in the early twentieth century. The black and white photograph depicted the sculptures laid out on display for a customs inspection before their transport to and installation in the museum. Actions such as stealing, looting, and purchasing diverse objects and displaying them together in one Western institution (the custom house) and destined for another (the Western museum), is, for Azoulay, destroying diverse social, cultural, and political fabrics. This reductive streamlining is an example of a strategy for fitting diverse and violently acquired things into the "neutral” imperial archive. Using an image of Elmina Castle, the coastal trade village set up by the Portuguese, she argued how the multiplicity of records regarding the sale of people at such places ensured the perpetrators would be shielded from accountability. The archive, through records and maps of relevant, testifying documents filled with dates and spatial demarcations, acted as a cover for actions that need reparation. Azoulay also included documents of first-person accounts, including the 1847 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself. The projected quotation read, “The man who stole me as soon I was born, recorded the birth of all the infants which he claimed to be born on his property, in a book which he kept for that purpose.” The men and women kidnapped were never simply slaves, but carried a whole world, a whole history with them. However, in the archive, in such documents as the man’s record book, Azoulay argues, a slave is a slave is a slave. Stored in the archive and tagged as “slave,” even such rich texts as Brown’s can essentially become a document detached from the realm of human affairs. This is what Azoulay termed “paper-regulated destruction” – that is, to destroy whole worlds using the guise of documents which function – in protection of the perpetrators - as authorized scripts. Azoulay acknowledges the seduction of the archive for scholars, and she warns of its invitation to enter as a trap. The scholar is first welcomed into the archive through the aura of the papers, believing they are not acting from an imperial vision, but from neutral documents, making them more receptive to the idea that history is formed by individuals who can act alone against imperial power. The scholar is then seduced to seek and reconstruct missing pieces that imperial actors themselves concealed. Thus, scholars are caught within the circle of the archive, led to believe these documents tell a true story of imperial regimes which only they can reconstruct. In reality they become trapped into the violent, circular logic of the archive. Azoulay closed her talk closed by imploring scholars, her audience, to envision going on strike of the imperial archive enmasse. She cited historical precedents for this, including W.E.B Du Bois, who stopped going to the archive because of its circulatory trap. Azoulay purports a kind of scholarship that, in her words, keeps the shutter open instead of closing it, storing it, and labeling it. The question and answer period addressed issues of applying the concept of the violent imperial archive to additional cultural contexts, including the construct of Orientalism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Azoulay responded affirmatively, arguing that the history of imperialism overrides any cultural taxonomies by its one taxonomy. She recognized the particularities of different contexts, but suggested that the destructivenesss of the imperial enterprise constantly renews itself. Another audience member queried the possible violence of the documents themselves, which Azoulay was careful to reframe, bringing the culpability back to the people who used them. She made a crucial point here, too: the rights that we often defend and advocate are, in practice, worldless rights because they are not applied to the worlds destroyed. Rights that are not inscribed anywhere else but in documents are not human rights because they require a document and an institution a priori. Azoulay is also a filmmaker. A Thursday morning screening of her 2004 film, I also dwell among your people: Conversations with Azmi Bishara, in Hebrew with English subtitles expanded upon the theme of worldless rights brought up in the Q and A and further elucidated her ideas on citizenry, imperial violence, and, what she called, the “propaganda machine.” The film was a series of interviews with Bishara, an Arab citizen of Israel who formerly represented Israel’s Palestinian minority in the Knesset, but who has since been forced to leave the country. Through a series of news clips, speeches, and interviews, often framed as if he was talking to no one (symbolic of his political reality), Bishara made a passionate appeal to the need for full citizenship, rights, and political participation for Arabs in Israel. The film ultimately reveals, what Weissman called in her introduction of Azoulay, the incredible “impact and political urgency” of Azoulay’s collective body of work.