Convened by Jerome Dent at Tulane University and Camille C. Dantzler at Xavier University of Louisiana

This work is, at its core, an act of imagination. No standard framework currently exists for preserving the  multimedia collections of scholars whose intellectual contributions span published texts, classroom materials, and community engagement. The Collaboratory will engage participants in the imaginative labor of inventing frameworks – asking what legacy preservation means when the materials in question emerge from the intellectual traditions and archival politics of Black and Diaspora studies rather than dominant archival institutions. Under the supervision of the lead IA convenors, funds will support a student worker to catalogue the archival materials. We will prioritize designing a metadata schema that centers postcolonial African film epistemologies, rather than retrofitting existing standards, requires collaborators to imagine audiences, access pathways, and descriptive vocabularies that do not exist yet. The Ukadike archive is both our pilot case and our provocation: through it, we imagine a higher education system and a community-engaged practice where the collections of scholars of African and African descendant media are treasured, properly cared for, and transmitted as living extensions of their  intellectual contributions to the generations to come. 

The Collaboratory’s cross-regional structure is essential to this imaginative work. The Collaboratory is  intentionally built across three interconnected regional hubs—New Orleans, Atlanta, and Midwest— whose African and African Diaspora film ecosystems include festivals, campus screening series,  community archives, libraries, museums, and independent cultural workers. With the archive housed at Tulane University in New Orleans, the Collaboratory brings together scholars from Southern institutions – including Xavier University and Morehouse College — alongside scholars and practitioners from the Midwest, including Michigan State University and Wayne State University. This multi-site structure allows the project to test its genealogies mapping and archival protocols in lived contexts: screenings and festival-adjacent programs with recorded talkbacks, practitioner-centered exhibition labs, community curated convenings, and archival stewardship practices that require negotiation across institutions and  community partners. Grounding each convening in regional infrastructures of exhibition and memory work, the Collaboratory advances a model of legacy-making that is not only scholarly, but public-facing, co-authored, and accountable to the communities that sustain African cinema’s afterlives. 

We connect film legacy ecosystems (kinship, festivals, screening series, campus/community programs) to  archival care (preservation, permissions, consent, description/metadata, digitization, access agreements) through two braided tracks: (1) an Exhibition Track grounded in creating innovative and accessible pedagogy, practitioner research and institutional ethics, and (2) an Archive Lab that produces reusable  stewardship protocols.