Public - Volume 36, Issue 71, 2025

This article examines the global dispersal of African film heritage through the case of the Paulin S. Vieyra Collection at Indiana University. Situating the paradigm of “shared heritage” within a broader context of archival displacement, the article interrogates both the promise and limitations of digitization and access as key modalities of North-South archival cooperation. Paulin S. Vieyra, a foundational figure in African cinema and one of its earliest historians, called for archival restitution and self-determination as early as the 1950s; his estate, which has recently been donated to the Black Film Center & Archive at IU, exemplifies the “bibliographic diaspora” of African cinema. The article explores the ethical, political, and epistemic stakes of curatorial authority, digital infrastructure, and access equity. Drawing on Vieyra’s own writings, it advocates for renewed transnational archival models that envision more equitable futures for African audiovisual heritage.

Exhibition review of Nova Scotia-born, Ohio-based artist Sheilah ReStack’s solo exhibition Susan’s Sword at The Blue Building Gallery, Halifax. The exhibition continues to explore ReStack’s long-term research into experimental photography.

Curated by Ingrid Jones, Labour invites reflection on the intent and impact of racialized inclusion in dominant institutions. Though the exhibition’s contents offer knowledge to any visitor who is willing to learn, it also speaks directly to a Black, Indigenous, and persons of colour (BIPOC) public by bringing together artists’ dedicated resources for collective survival. In so doing, the exhibition constructs a counter-archive that its racialized counter-public encounters through a diverse range of audio, visual, and tactile media that document Black and Indigenous resistance to historical and contemporary socio-economic exploitation.

The inherently moral nature of the choice to amplify or silence is the central focus of Tanya E. Clement’s Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives. This book review summarizes Clement’s work in applying the methodology of close listening to archival audio of five literary figures (Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Anne Sexton, and Gloria Anzaldúa). In noting the silences, absences, and amplifications in the recordings, Clement points to the ways in which meaning making in the archives is mediated by the technologies of preservation and access.