Caroline Charles is a PhD Candidate in the English department and a 2024-2025 Humanities Center Dissertation Fellow at Syracuse University. Her presentation discusses her inspirations, key questions, and provides an overview of her dissertation project, Practices of the Black Visual Archive in Film. Combining her practical experience in the archives and her expertise in Black film studies, she argues that late 20th and early 21st century Black filmmakers have actively participated in the tradition of
Black archival practice. Black filmmakers have intervened in official records,
utilizing archival materials to create filmic
counter-histories that negotiate the archive’s limits and attend to the
complexities of Black life and memory.
Working
against prevailing frameworks of devaluation, Black filmmakers
creatively harness the medium to destabilize archival truth claims, contend
with gaps in official records, generate their own archival collections, and/or
assert the value of everyday forms of historical knowledge. Her project locates Black filmmakers’ archival engagements inside a longer, undertheorized history of Black people harnessing cinema to stage protest. In this, she builds upon recent work in Black film studies by scholars such as Allyson Field and Anna Everett. In positing reparative and disruptive possibilities for archival studies as a discipline, she draws upon the work of Zakiya Collier and Tonia Sutherland.