Symposium Panel 6: Archival Affect

Archives are not neutral containers of information but sources of epistemic and affective disruption. What comes out of the archive may be of great cultural value to some and toxic to others, and not every cultural inheritance is a gift accepted with gratitude. How do we confront the disruptive potentials of archives without silencing reluctant inheritors?

Sukhpreet Kahlon is a film curator and critic and the Artistic Director of the South Asian Film Festival of Montreal. Her doctoral research explores film collectors and their collecting practices, and her current inquiry delves into forgotten histories and narratives of cinema. She works as a consultant on museum initiatives, film archives, and websites, preserving and contextualizing their collections. She has co-translated the book, Sone Chandi Ke Buth, a collection of writings on cinema by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas.

Mosa Mpetha is a film curator of Black, African, and Archive films. She founded Cinema Africa! a permanent program at Hyde Park Picture House in partnership with local diasporic communities. Mpetha is an advocate for DIY exhibitors, is involved in the Scalarama Leeds Film Festival, and mentors new programmers. Mpetha has a passion for the preservation and protection of African heritage and distributes new restorations of African titles. She is also developing her creative archival film practices.

Salma Siddique is research faculty at South Asian Societies and Cultures, Humboldt University Berlin. She is the author of Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (2022, Cambridge University Press). She is currently working on her second book project on film experience, offense, and fandom in postcolonial South Asia. She is a core editor at BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and serves on the editorial board of Film History.