Imagine Going on Strike: Museum Workers and Historians

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Alliances, Palestine 47-48, 2012. Film still. As Azoulay writes: “Between November 1947 (the UN Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (the creation of the state of Israel), many Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. The intense civil activity that had taken place throughout the country at that time was ignored and Palestine was destroyed by Jewish militias. By completely ignoring this expanded civil activity, historians endorsed this imperial violence, relating to destroyed Palestine as Israel. The removal of this activity from historical narratives enabled the retroactive depiction of the 1948 war as the culmination of a long-lasting national conflict, rather than as another imperial enterprise of destruction.”

Issue #104

November 2019

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Notes

Alex Gourevitch, “A Radical Defense of the Right to Strike,” Jacobin, July 12, 2018 →.

See Anthony Cuthbertson, “Amazon Workers ‘Refuse’ to Build Tech for US Immigration, Warning Jeff Bezos of IBM’s Nazi Legacy,” Independent, June 22, 2018 →.

On strikes within the world of art, see Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso, 2016); Kuba Szreder, “Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom,” e-flux journal no. 87 (December, 2017) →; “Alternative Economies Working Group,” Arts and Labor →; and Gulf Labor Artists Coalition →.

See the BBC film Bankers Guide to Art (2016), in which art is presented as an exceptionally stable asset, worthy of investment →.

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008): 9–10.

Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “Glossary of Haunting,” in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis (Routledge, 2013), 643.

Tuck and Ree, “Glossary of Haunting,” 643.

For examples, see the Native Land map of North America →; and the Nakba Map by Zochrot →.

This text is an excerpt from Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, published this month by Verso Books.

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