How The Black Archival Imagination Lab Engages History

In the pursuit of reshaping how we engage with Black histories, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute’s Black Archival Imagination Lab (BAIL) thoughtfully incorporates areas of scholarship, activism, and memory work. 

Launched under the guidance of Associate Professor Christopher Ouma and Assistant Professor Khwezi Mkhize, and with support from the Office of Global Affairs at Duke, the lab represents a profound extension of their longstanding commitment to Pan-African intellectual and cultural inquiry.

Years before BAIL was even established, the seeds were sown beyond the walls of Duke University. Mkhize and Ouma were both graduate students studying African literature at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, when they first crossed paths. 

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Their dedication to literature and Africana studies in East, Southern, and West Africa nourished their early academic pursuits, which were deeply anchored in Pan-Africanism, diaspora studies, and revolutionary Black thought.

Their collaboration deepened during the student-led #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town, which challenged the colonial legacies embedded in South African higher education. 

By creating courses that concentrated on Black cultural archives and revolutionary histories, Ouma and Mkhize, in their capacity as professors, actively addressed calls for curriculum reform. They came to share a vision in the process: to establish spaces that engage Black archival materials as living, breathing sites of decolonial imagination and reimagined futures, rather than merely as artifacts from the past.

“During this time, I got interested in thinking about literary imagination within the space and reading about these issues in Cape Town,” Ouma said. “And I started asking ‘what does it mean to think about Black and African identity from that space?’”

Supported initially by a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, their “Black Archives and Intellectual Histories” seminar series in Cape Town became the foundation for what would eventually be reborn at FHI as the Black Archival Imagination Lab.

Today, BAIL is a thriving interdisciplinary platform at FHI—exploring how archives, especially those shaped by histories of enslavement, empire, apartheid, and anti-colonial struggle, inform Black thought and creativity today. Through graduate seminars, public events, visiting scholars, and archival projects, the lab offers a space where dynamic scholarship meets the broader community and where memory is activated as a tool for resistance and renewal.

We have very big dreams around Black archival imagination. With the resources we’re currently working on gathering, we could extend the reach of the lab’s work to publishers and future scholars trying to engage with archives in this way. 

“That dynamic space led us to having deep conversations about important dialogues,” Mkhize explained. “It really got us to think about other intersections around decolonization and decoloniality, and with the archive we were able to add a dimension that showed just how these histories existed.”

The digitization of the Hugh Exton photographic archive in South Africa is one of the lab's primary ongoing projects. It consists of more than 20,000 glass negatives taken in Exton's photo studio between 1892 and 1945. The visual cultures of the worldwide Black diaspora are strongly impacted by these eerie photographs, which chronicle forced labor, ordinary Black life, and colonial power structures.

BAIL has committed to digitizing a significant portion of this archive, collaborating with South African universities, independent filmmakers, and photographers to preserve and reinterpret these materials for contemporary audiences.

Future plans for the lab are ambitious and expansive: curating exhibitions, hosting symposia on Black photography, developing multi-sited archival exhibits between South Africa and Durham, and even building a dedicated book series centered on Black archival imagination. They have an upcoming edited collection with Duke Press releasing under the same name: Black Archival Imagination. 

Through these initiatives, Ouma and Mkhize hope to foster a multi-generational dialogue about memory, belonging, and decolonization.

“We have very big dreams around Black archival imagination,” Ouma shared. “With the resources we’re currently working on gathering, we could extend the reach of the lab’s work to publishers and future scholars trying to engage with archives in this way.”

At its core, the Black Archival Imagination Lab is not merely about preserving the past—it is about reclaiming and reanimating it to imagine new futures. As Ouma and Mkhize’s journeys from Nairobi to Johannesburg to Durham show, the work of Black archival imagination transcends borders, linking struggles, dreams, and memories across oceans and continents.