Short Abstract

This panel examines African film archives as prisms through which histories are projected, refracted, and contested. It explores how digitisation, restitution, and creative reuse serve as contested practices that reshape visual memory, authorship, and the politics of viewing.

Long Abstract

This panel takes African film archives as prisms through which histories are projected and refracted into multiple, often competing, narratives. Focusing specifically on moving image collections shaped by colonial and postcolonial infrastructures — wherever they may be found — we ask how digitisation, restitution, and reactivation transform both the content and the meaning of film.

Film functioned across the twentieth century as a powerful medium for mediating state authority, national politics, development visions, educational campaigns, and everyday life. Yet many film collections remain displaced, inaccessible, or partially understood. Recent efforts to recover, digitise, and recirculate film archives have begun to reveal not only new empirical histories, but also the layered politics of their production, circulation, and preservation. These materials offer critical insight into media histories, decolonisation processes, and the visual construction of political power.

This panel foregrounds methodologies that treat film archives as dynamic sites of encounter: between institutions and communities, past and present, scholarship and artistic practice. It invites contributions that examine collaborative and Africa-led approaches to audiovisual restitution, the ethics of digital return, and the role of filmmakers and artists in reinterpreting archival footage.

By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the panel asks: how does the lens – both literal and analytical – shape what is seen, remembered, and obscured? What new forms of knowledge emerge when film archives are re-situated within contemporary publics? And how might such practices reconfigure authority over African visual histories?

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