The Black (Universal) Archive and the Architecture of Black Cinema

Black cinema, as an institution and medium for recording and preserving Blackness, is a vast and complicated film category. A true Black cinematic archive would mean imagining an archive of everything, and everything in between. The work of Black cinema studies is to make sense of this archive and articulate the theoretical productivity of the category. This essay explores the appearance and shapes of these structures of knowledge, how they are constructed around Blackness in the hopes of containing and making sense of its extremes, and argues that exploring the vast field of Black cinema and Black cinema studies is an architectural endeavor. Using Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” as a model, this article performs a spatial analysis of a short fi lm to understand how the Black cinematic archive coheres disparate bodies, objects, and images into a unified and coherent structure.