00;00;01;00 - 00;00;25;15 Speaker 1 This is Rachel reading for Palestine From the Stolen Lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. I'll be reading the face of potential history and Learning Imperialism by Ariella Azoulay. I would have loved to have been a part of an identity group. I wish I could have been able to say that I belonged to my community. But there is no community to which I truly belong. 00;00;25;18 - 00;00;45;24 Speaker 1 Here is my proof. I own many objects and artifacts and some works of art. None of these, even those I inherited from my parents or received as gifts from family and friends were handed to me as a recognition of my belonging. I have not a thing from Oron Algeria, where my father and his ancestors were born and lived until the late 1940s. 00;00;46;16 - 00;01;08;26 Speaker 1 I have nothing from Spain, from where my mother's ancestors were expelled in 1492. I do not even have their immaterial belongings like Ladino, the language Jews spoke in Spain and passed down to their children for generations. Ladino did not become mine because my mother, who has been born in Palestine, was turned from a Palestinian Jew into an Israeli. 00;01;09;05 - 00;01;41;13 Speaker 1 At the age of 19. She was induced by the newly constituted state to forget all languages except Hebrew. My mother did not talk with me in her mother tongue. Nor did my father in his. I was born Israeli by default and was raised to be a member of the state's Jewish community. This nation state project of becoming naturally born Israeli was meant to replace prior imperial visions of belonging and belonging to communities destroyed or shaped with violence while being projected on and through my body. 00;01;42;13 - 00;02;15;24 Speaker 1 I do not recall all of them. But in addition to the 1492 expulsion, I can mention the occupation of Algeria in 1830 that the Crimea decree of 1870, the rule of which you France in Algeria in 1941, and UN Resolution 181 in 1947 that unleashed the destruction of Palestine. This book was written as a part of my refusal to be an Israeli, to think like an Israeli, to identify myself as an Israeli, or to be recognized as an Israeli. 00;02;16;19 - 00;02;48;07 Speaker 1 I refused, partly because being an Israeli means being entitled to stolen lands and the property of others. I do not refuse, however, to assume the implications of this perpetrator's position that I inherited and out of against which this book has been written. My refusal is now embodied in the onto epistemological political imaginary that this book stages in which the potentiality of being a Palestinian Jew, let alone an Algerian Jew, is not foreclosed. 00;02;49;07 - 00;03;15;16 Speaker 1 Before 1948, there was nothing extraordinary in this pair of words Palestinian Jews, but with the insane project to destroy Palestine, which was unleashed in 1947 and has not yet come to an end. Today is this coupling of Jew and Palestinian and the status it indicates sounds like an aberration. My refusal doesn't try to dream up a new category. 00;03;16;12 - 00;03;40;15 Speaker 1 It is rather a refusal to accept that our predecessors dreams not necessarily our parents, but their parents or grandparents can no longer be ours. As if three tenses of past, present and future that separate us fix us in different eras were not invented exactly for this purpose. The only material object to which I'm attached is not mine. It will never be mine. 00;03;41;05 - 00;04;06;18 Speaker 1 This photograph of an empty wooden box is included in this book for the slight chance that relatives of its owners might recognize and claim it. It belongs to its owners, but it is also an object of potential history. This is why a few years ago, I entrusted myself with this box to help claim the existence of a different world, one where violence that ought not to have happened could be unimaginable again. 00;04;07;16 - 00;04;31;26 Speaker 1 In the midst of violence of the 1947 partition plan unleashed in the proximity of this box. Jews and Arabs exchanged mutual promises of cooperation to hold the world, destroying violence at bay. These promises were broken, but not by those who exchange them. They were violated by Jewish militias. The Arab villages were invaded and many of its inhabitants were massacred. 00;04;32;21 - 00;04;56;27 Speaker 1 The future of this violence that was made past should be aborted. When I moved to the United States in 2013 and joined the faculty at Brown University, I felt how easily one could be drawn into the fast forward project of the neoliberal American university surrounded here by the wealth of objects, documents, images and resources available in public and private museums, archives and universities. 00;04;57;10 - 00;05;24;09 Speaker 1 I soon felt obliged to delve into the study of world's that the accumulation and dubious ownership of such wealth helped to destroy. This was a natural expansion of my interest in the potential history of Palestine and its destruction. I came to understand that the structural deferral of reparations for slavery was the organizing principle of imperial political regimes, as well as the intellectual wealth of universities. 00;05;25;13 - 00;05;51;03 Speaker 1 The challenge became how not to become imperialism as ambassador and not to normalize the privileged access to these objects offered to school scholars and rather to recognize others rights to end in them. Out of my commitment to the radical return to Palestine and to a radical negation of the past that operates as a way to shut down potential history and close shut the wooden box I had opened to think with. 00;05;51;16 - 00;06;22;14 Speaker 1 In writing this book, I found myself changing scales. Instead of focusing on several decades of the history of Palestine, my research came to spend centuries and across the globe dictated by the history of imperialism without undermining differences between places, situations and lived experiences. I tried to use this change of scale to consolidate an anti-imperial onto a epistemological framework through which everything and every place affected by Western imperialism could be thought together. 00;06;23;27 - 00;06;46;28 Speaker 1 These changes in scale helped me to further elaborate the political ontology of photography. A subject to which I dedicated several books and to account for it as a central part of imperial technology. Photography in this sense is irreducible to the invention of the scope device. The thrust forward rhythm of the click of the camera shutter acts like a verdict. 00;06;47;11 - 00;07;15;10 Speaker 1 A very limited portion of information is captured, framed, and made appropriate by those who become its rights holders. The verdict shutter is common to other imperial technologies and was in use prior to the invention of the camera. There is, however, an excess of information not processed left illegible. But nonetheless, there since others besides the photographers were and still are also present and left their marks on the scene. 00;07;16;17 - 00;07;50;25 Speaker 1 I realized that the best way to access this undercurrent photographic data is to trace the images with a pencil or with scissors without inhabiting the expected spectator position. That is to refuse to be the photographer. The results of this experimental effort appear throughout the book as a series of images that may look like drawings. It is, however, more accurate to see them as attempts to trace this undercurrent photographic data to respond to the potential that exists.