Short Abstract

This panel addresses the urgent issue of Africa’s endangered celluloid heritage. It examines recent, innovative audio-visual archival projects for the insights they have produced, their effect on public histories, and the models they provide for archival decolonization and restitution.

Long Abstract

Politics has always been visual and never more so than today. But often overlooked in studies of African decolonization in the mid-twentieth century is the audio-visual culture through which state leaders, cinematic auteurs, industry professionals, and amateur filmmakers sought to make new visions of life, the nation, and the future both intelligible and popular. Part of the reason for this lacuna is that today much of this audio-visual heritage is lost, damaged, or forgotten. The common explanation that this erasure is due to the materiality of celluloid ignores the tragic political reasons for the decline and loss of the continent’s audio-visual archives – only eight African states have national film archives – which has left much of the continent’s remaining heritage sequestered in exile in hard-to-access facilities in the Global North. This panel examines the recent projects that have reckoned with this urgent problem. It explores the new historical insights, the political effects on public history, and the models of archival decolonization and restitution that such audio-visual archive projects have produced – and examines who should be responsible for carrying out this work.

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