Part 2 of 2 from the #Orphans2022 Counter-Archives Session 4 of 16 — Africa (as seen from abroad) — recorded June 16, 2022.
In part 1, CK Ming & Bleakley McDowell of the National Museum of African American History and Culture present rushes from the unfinished documentary Pan Africa (1971) by Lebert Bethune. 42 min.
In part 2, Mark Williams (Dartmouth College) & Aboubakar Sanogo (Carleton University) present a variety of films from the Sherman Grinberg Film Library and the U.S. National Archives regarding the history of colonialism and “the idea of Africa.” These are part of the ongoing Media Ecology Project, which connects scholarly research and archival collections.
Click to enlarge, or watch at vimeo.com/729665752
Abstract from Williams and Sanogo:
This presentation will introduce a new research initiative on the study of little-known archival U.S. cinema that represents Africa. Since the emergence of the moving image in the late 19th century, Africa has been the subject of millions of feet of film footage that have sought to describe, understand, interpellate, colonize, dominate but also emancipate the African continent, and project it into the future.
The Media Ecology Project (MEP) at Dartmouth is a digital resource that empowers researchers to access, analyze, and teach with moving image collections online. Our research about representations of Africa on film is drawn from a considerable number of largely ignored archival materials from The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), including many educational and documentary films produced or collected by the U.S. Department of State, the Office of War Information, Office of Strategic Services, U.S. Air Force, Office of Economic Opportunity, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Peace Corps, and the U.S. Information Agency, as well as the Harmon Foundation, Ford Motor Company, and The March of Time organization. These NARA materials will be contrasted to American Pathé Newsreel and Paramount Newsreel materials from the private Sherman Grinberg Film Library that chiefly represent Africa as a site for colonial prowess and attendant spectacles of ceremony for European royalty.
This complex, contradictory archival corpus demands a revisitation through contemporary lenses to better understand the histories that inform our present and to articulate different and necessary futures. The digital humanities provide a means by which such a revisitation of our collective moving image past will be possible.
Bios
Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College where he founded The Journal of e-Media Studies, co-edited the book series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture, and directs an NEH-supported DH research initiative, The Media Ecology Project (MEP).
Aboubakar Sanogo is an Associate Professor in Film Studies at Carleton University. His research interests include African cinema, Afro-diasporic cinema, documentary film and media, transnational and world cinema, film archiving and film heritage, colonial cinema, postcolonialism, race and cinema and the relationship between film form, history and theory.
