This series will focus on the role imperial institutions played in nonfiction film history. As tools of colonial administration, this series and its speakers will illustrate how nonfiction films promoted state projects, public health campaigns, and the idea of empire in an effort to fashion modern colonial subjects. In addition to studying and shaping its subjects through film, this series will also outline how the state established nonfiction film institutions and practices to maintain imperial order. Furthermore, it will examine how the documentary image, its institutional home, and its role in projecting and modeling national and other subjectivities emerged as critical areas of intervention both in the decolonization movement and after independence. This series is sponsored by Center for Documentary Research and Practice, the Media School, the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Mellon Foundation, and IU Cinema.
Prexy Nesbitt is an activist and educator who has worked over the past four decades to connect freedom-loving peoples in Africa and North America to each other in order to strengthen progressive political and social movements on both continents. While Nesbitt has traveled extensively in Africa, Europe, and North America, Chicago remains his home and the primary locus of his work as an educator. He has taught at the high school and college levels as well as serving as a school administrator. He has also been a mentor, within and outside of formal educational structures, to scores of young people around the country, who, inspired by his example, have themselves become activists. Marissa Moorman is an Associate Professor in Indiana University’s Department of History. She is a historian of southern Africa, and her research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola. She is interested in the ways that cultural practice is productive of politics and not just derivative of it. Much of her evidence comes from interviews with musicians and consumers of music, and she explores how memory, experience and pleasure shape politics and history.
Lee Grieveson is Director of the Graduate Program in Film Studies at University College London. He is the author of The Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, and co-editor of Empire and Film and Film and the End of Empire.
