Date of Award

5-11-2025

Date Published

June 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Advisor(s)

Roger Hallas

Keywords

Archival Practice;Archives;Black Film;Community Archives;Vernacular Photographs;Visual Studies

Abstract

Black Filmmaking as Archival Practice argues that cinema has offered Black cultural workers a generative space to creatively challenge the constraints of traditional archival repositories. I claim that Black filmmakers participate in a tradition of Black archival practice; they intervene in dominant collections and utilize their materials to create filmic counter-histories that negotiate the archive’s limits and attend to Black humanity, life, and memory. I engage with a diverse constellation of late twentieth and early-twenty-first century films that consider archives of Black social movement, abject images, enslavement and portraiture, Black queer and trans existence, and Black family photography. Through historical and textual analysis, the dissertation demonstrates how Black filmmakers creatively harness the medium to destabilize archival truth claims, contend with gaps in official records, and generate their own archival collections. The dissertation is bookended with personal reflections detailing my own experience learning and applying Black archival practice in Syracuse, NY. I discuss how my understanding of Black archival practice is informed by my work co-curating an exhibition in Bird Library’s Special Collections Research Center, A Love Supreme: Black Cultural Expression and Political Activism of the 1960s and 1970s (2023). I show how the Turning the Lens Collective’s Black Family Photography in Syracuse digital collection of photographs and oral histories is created through a film-based photo-sharing methodology. The dissertation ultimately makes the case that Black filmmaker’s archival interventions are located inside a longer, undertheorized history of Black people negotiating cinema despite its history of devaluation. Additionally, it asserts that Black filmmakers present reparative and disruptive possibilities for modes of documenting, preserving, and curating material histories.

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Open Access

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