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I am a historian by profession, and a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Africa more specifically. I have also worked in the film world for over a decade, from running small African film festivals to working as a programming associate for artistic director Cameron Bailey and programmer Rasha Salti at the Toronto International Film Festival. I have curated academic programs on African and Black diaspora filmmaking and have taught courses on the relationship between film and history: film as source of history, film as reconstruction of history, and film as history itself.
And so the debate around Selma and the responsibility of filmmakers to the historical imagination hits particularly close to home. These debates emerge periodically, usually when particular pundits or involved parties, sometimes with academic credentials though often not, charge a big budget, historical drama with historical inaccuracy. They trot out their lists of grievances: historical omissions, problems of chronology, personal knowledge of particular aspects of the events in question, and the retreat to artistic license at the expense of historical fidelity.
Running through these debates is the assumption of a tension between the imagination and what “really happened,” between fiction and history. This tension speaks directly to a pervasive misapprehension about what the study of history is now. Very few historians today would define their work as the collection of objective and verifiable facts that allow for the writing of a singular, complete, and “true” history; few historians today believe this actually exists.
