The Contours of Black Women’s “Historical Imagination”: An Interview with Shola Lynch

In this interview, professor Ellen Scott interviews professor Shola Lynch, the latter a key figure of contemporary documentary, whose work centers the lives and impact of Black women public figures. Lynch’s nuanced, archivally-saturated approach to her work creates films with the depth of academic history and the accessibility and visual and stylistic interest to bring a much wider audience to the table, no mean feat. Over the course of her career, Lynch has also developed an archivally driven image-based historiographic approach in her work that is singular and worthy of greater note within Media Studies, a discipline increasingly turning to images, rather than text, to explain images. In this discussion, Lynch and Scott focus on Lynch’s pathbreaking documentary Chisholm ‘72 (2004), a project in which she, out of nowhere, announced herself to the world as a filmmaker and storyteller to be reckoned with by treating an all-but ignored history Chisholm’s bid for the presidency. Lynch has consistently used her background in archival history as a launchpad for media production that is at once soulfully intimate and announces the importance of Black women to the foundations of American History.