Revisiting Lists in a Time of Neutrality

On May 22nd, I began writing the essay that you are now reading, which is a sequel to “Revisiting Lists in a Time of Rebellion” published in this very journal on July 5, 2020. I emerged from pandemic-induced numbness in June 2020 to write an essay on the frenzy of anti-racist list-making and sharing ignited by the public lynching of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin of the Minnesota Police. While I name the perpetrator here as a factual gesture, it is more accurate to attribute this lynching and many others before, after and alongside it, to the violence of policing as a global institution.¹While the literature on policing and police abolition is vast, Rinaldo Walcott’s pamphlet essay, On Property, provides a succinct and brilliant overview of the relationships between transatlantic slavery and policing as a global form. See: Rinaldo Walcott, On Property (Windsor: Bibliostasis, 2021). May 22nd is exactly three days before the anniversary of Floyd’s murder. 

Every now and again, I recall a comment made by artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith in the wake of this lynching on Instagram that I drew upon as an ending to my essay. Smith’s luminous first feature, Drylongso (1998), appeared on an anti-racist film list for W magazine, which prompted her post.

Smith makes two sobering observations about her inclusion in this list. Firstly, that it is an incredible travesty that the very production of this list rests upon “an eight minute and forty-six minute snuff film.” And secondly, she does not hold out much hope that these lists will ensure that Black artists will continue “to get this kind of press for the decades of work we have done to illuminate the lives of Black folk.” Lists are rightly viewed with suspicion by those who are usually kept out of them.²Malini Guha, “Revisiting Lists in a Time of Rebellion,” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture 5, no. 2 (2020), https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/07/revisiting-lists-in-a-time-of-rebellion/. 

I have returned to Smith’s comments over the years, as the lists diminished and as top-down and bottom-up anti-racist imperatives flourished for their own distinct and sometimes intersecting publics throughout universities in this place now called Canada. The Scarborough Charter was born; EDI offices opened or were renewed; EDI scholarships for students and faculty were announced; grassroots anti-racist organizing took hold in certain sites; some of us focused on strengthening campus unions as organizational structures that needed to be leveraged more forcefully to fight anti-Black racism.³The Scarborough Charter, formed in 2021, was created in the wake of Floyd’s murder to combat anti-Black racism in universities in Canada. The Charter was adopted and signed by 40 institutions when it was first formed: https://scarboroughcharter.ca/about/ Throughout this period, I often thought to myself that the brutal killing of Floyd led to all of this, and this fact was not something that could or should be reconciled. And it is during these moments that Smith comes to mind. 

A List for Inoculation

In the years since I wrote “Revisiting Lists,” I have been preoccupied with what Paul Gilroy identifies as the pedagogical impetus of list-making and sharing in 2020.

Paul Gilroy, in conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, situates this period of list-making as an indictment of entrenched educational models that have traditionally kept ‘race’ at bay, while Gilmore speculates that this newfound “hunger for lists” may contribute to turning this period of uprising into a large scale movement. Both observations add credence to my suggestion that a practice of anti-racism, as a mode of both learning and building, is gaining traction within a much larger public sphere.⁴Guha, “Revisiting Lists”. 

I remain absorbed by this question of traction. As I noted in the essay, the sharing of the lists and the guides and the toolkits and the resources on ‘how not to be racist’ rested in a fantasy that an engagement with reading, viewing or listening materials is enough to stimulate ‘becoming.’ And here it is useful, as always, to think with Stuart Hall on these matters. As Hall observes in “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” those of us working with cultural forms are necessarily displaced from them, as the “decentered” nature of culture makes it difficult to forge direct relationships between these forms and other structures.⁵Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies,” in Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies, eds. C. Kuan-Hsing and D. Morely (Florence: Routledge, 1996), 81.

While the lists bear the promise of traction, Hall’s insights give us language to think through the difficulties of translating knowledge gleaned from cultural materials and especially works of art, into a praxis that can transform beings and worlds. As Lauren Michelle Jackson explains about the anti-racist reading list with reference to its “gooey mass” variation that groups together texts irrespective of genre or category, they are primed for a zoological approach that forces questions of form and style aside in favour of, as I put it, ‘what can this book do for me?’⁶Lauren Michele Jackson, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For,” Vulture, published June 4, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/anti-racist-reading-lists-what-are-they-for.html?fbclid=IwAR0yxpZ8zUnKVuFHRzI-V0LELrsJXBAi-OPREdv90wh-ZX60HSvRnbnLNfU. Michael B. Gillespie details a similarly extractive reading tendency when it comes to Black cinema, rooted in “the belief in Black film’s indexical tie to the Black lifeworld” that is reproduced in what I described as the lazier version of the anti-racist film list.⁷Michael B. Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 2. Form and style but also the affective and sensorial responses that an artwork may generate all account for the displaced and decentered nature of art as a particular kind of cultural form that resists being harnessed in a direct way for anyone looking to become less racist. But we also know that many of the books that were ordered from independent Black bookstores in the U.S. on the basis of these lists were never picked up while some bookstore owners observed that certain customers were primarily interested in obtaining copies of White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo rather than books written by Black authors in their quests to become ‘anti-racist.’⁸Katherine Morgan, “About that Wave of Anti-Racist Bestsellers Over the Summer,” Literary Hub, published November 25, 2020, https://lithub.com/about-that-wave-of-anti-racist-bestsellers-over-the-summer/. 

The books are there, they’ve always been there, yet the lists keep coming, bathing us in the pleasure of a recommendation. But that’s the thing about the reading. It has to be done.⁹Jackson, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For.” 

As Jackson writes, and as these anecdotes imply, part of the problem with these lists resides in the very aim of anti-racism that drives their production and, in 2020, their brief but incessant circulation. She asserts that “something keener than anti-racism must be sought,” such as an engagement with questions of power, capital and even race itself if these lists are to have any transformative potential.¹⁰Jackson, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For.” Instead, ‘becoming’ in this context aspires leaping over this inherently prickly and sometimes treacherous terrain to ascend to what Jackson describes as “the enlightened order of the anti-racist,” no significant labour required.¹¹Jackson, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For.” Despite this critique of the anti-racist reading list that I also subscribe to, I have never quite been able to let go of the idea, articulated by Gilroy, that these lists serve as an indictment against entrenched educational models and in doing so, simultaneously serves up a demand for otherwise curriculums. Can the list as a particular kind of form be mobilized for such a project? Can a list, to paraphrase Elena Gorfinkel in “Against Lists,” be for something other than laundry?¹²Elena Gorfinkel, “Against Lists,” Another Gaze, published November 29, 2019, https://www.anothergaze.com/elena-gorfinkel-manifesto-against-lists/.

Fittingly, it is the work of Cauleen Smith that has prompted this question and provided one possible answer in Human_3.0 Reading List (2015-16).¹³See: https://www.artic.edu/artworks/238577/human-3-0-reading-list. This is not a list that resembles the ones that Smith suddenly found herself on in 2020. Human_3.0 Reading List began as drawings of the covers of fourteen books on graph paper in 2015 that was accompanied by a manifesto. The project later expanded to fifty-seven drawings and was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. This project constitutes Smith’s engagement with philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s call to imagine a new praxis of being human, one that parts ways from Man1 and Man2 that thrive on accumulation, as Katherine McKittrick puts it.¹⁴As McKittrick explains, Man1 and Man2 can be found across Wynter’s writings. Man1 or homo politicus, invented in the Renaissance period, remained tied to “to the theological order of knowledge of pre-Renaissance Latin-Christian medieval Europe.” Man2 or homo oeconomicus, on the heels of Man1, names the bourgeois, Western-order of being human that took hold in the second half of the 19th century. See: Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 10. For an introduction to these figures in Wynter’s writing, please see: Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review (Fall 2003): 257-337. This new praxis of being human acknowledges that we, following Frantz Fanon, are hybrid beings, both bios and mythoi.¹⁵As Wynter explains, Fanon charts a path away from a strictly bio-centric understanding of what it means to be human by acknowledging that such an understanding is itself an invention of human storytelling and not a fact. As McKittrick writes, “Humans are, then, a biomutationally evolved, hybrid species—storytellers who now storytellingly invent themselves as being purely biological. With this, particular (presently biocentric) macro-origin stories are overrepresented as the singular narrative through which the stakes of human freedom are articulated and marked.” See: Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 330-331; McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter, 11. Smith’s hand-drawn covers span genres, categories and writers including Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015) edited by Katherine McKittrick, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) by Fanon. Some drawings include a hand holding the book or touching the side of the cover. 

And so I declare once more: Black people are engaged in combat without the proper armor. In addition to gas masks and kevlar jackets, and smart phone video, we require inoculations that repel the seductions of corporate servitude. I offer this as an action:

STUDY. Deep and active study.¹⁶Cauleen Smith, “Human_3.0 Reading List Manifesto,” published June 15, 2015, https://readinglisthumanthreepointo.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/june-16-2015/.

The stakes of Smith’s reading list, as elaborated upon in her manifesto, are far greater than ‘becoming anti-racist.’ To borrow Jackson’s words, something keener is being proposed here, which is a practice of deep study intended to trigger “low-grade inoculation” for neoliberalism and the harms that the neoliberal order inflicts on Black people specifically. Jackson’s triangulation of ‘power, capital and race’ constitutes the very basis of Smith’s manifesto and her corresponding list, where the historical legacies of policing and slavery are drawn together as the foundations of “The United States as a beacon of capitalism” where Black peoples continue to be subjected to “brute force and coercive control within our cultural and economic markets.”¹⁷Smith, “Human_3.0.” 

As Hall writes, “metaphors are serious things. They affect one’s practice.”¹⁸Hall, “Cultural Studies,” 78. The metaphor of inoculation directs our attention toward educational models rooted in the urgent need for protection and fortification against anti-Blackness writ large. Inoculation is positioned as the first step towards becoming, which entails developing a political praxis of survival and of world-building. A guide for study is offered in the manifesto, which as Jackson notes, is a missing component of the anti-racist reading list.¹⁹Jackson, “What is an Anti-Racist Reading List For.” For Smith, study must be augmented with conversation oriented towards the precise aim of building resistance.²⁰Smith, “Human_3.0.” Solitary reading is not enough, which brings Moten and Harney’s notion of a “common intellectual practice” to mind, as a method of study that can only be undertaken for and with others.²¹Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 110. Ultimately, the stakes of this list lie in the making of an entirely new genre of being human. 

Turning to the list itself, Smith’s decision to draw the book covers entails a method of iteration and translation; in interviews, she situates the drawing of the covers as an aesthetic translation of the durational experience of reading a book.²²Cauleen Smith, “Cauleen Smith on How Art Facilitates Protest and Introspection,” Art in America, published June 19, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/cauleen-smith-interview-art-facilitates-protest-and-introspection-1202691811/. Smith speculates that looking at these drawings may provoke a durational experience for viewers, encouraging them to slowly and gradually take in images that are so radically different from the high-definition, seamless imagery that floods the present.²³Smith, “Cauleen Smith.” The deliberately haphazard style of the drawings, with their incomplete lines, colour occasionally seeping out of the edges of the covers, and wrinkles etched deep into the graph paper are all tangible marks of Smith’s praxis of making. In aiming to facilitate a durational encounter, Smith’s list can be situated in opposition to what Gorfinkel argues is the limited “attentional real-estate” of the list in its “recirculated and compulsory” form and especially in its digital variation, which as she writes, is geared towards the “fatigued, enervated, click hungry.”²⁴Gorfinkel, “Against Lists.” The formal elements of the list direct us toward the interrelated actions of durational encounters and iteration as models for inoculation, conceived of as a method of learning and making as well as serving and as aspiration, where these methods might feed into a political practice. 

In interviews, Smith further imagines a spatial counterpart to her work, which is a reading room for Black activists filled with the books from her list, a space for them to read or to recuperate after a protest or to fortify themselves before attending one.²⁵Smith, “Cauleen Smith.” What Smith wants to give activists and viewers alike is time and space. She continually suggests that a list of foundational texts is not enough, but we must create the conditions and the spaces within which durational encounters with them can be staged and the possibility of traction can emerge. Smith’s manifesto positions the list as a catalyst for a broader project of manifesting new beings for otherwise worlds or, to evoke Smith’s words, her list is for the “afro-nihilist” who knows better than to mourn the destruction of the world as is.²⁶Smith, “Human_3.0.” 

In the end, Human_3.0 Reading List isn’t much of a list though it mobilizes the list as form. Rather, it is a model for Black study, embedded in the very form of the work which, alongside the manifesto, is itself is a guide for how to develop a “weaponized and generative consciousness” to go with the gasmasks, kevlar jackets, and cell phone videos.²⁷Smith, “Human_3.0.” This is, in fact, the list that fulfills what Gilroy identifies as the pedagogical promise of list-making and sharing in 2020 which perhaps those lists, in the end, did not or not in a widespread way. Smith teaches viewers of the work not simply what they should be reading but provides cues for how they should be reading and concrete reasons why they should be reading. 

Smith is also explicit about who this list is for.²⁸As a person of South Asian descent who is a settler in Canada, I am not the list’s primary recipient. However, I am deeply indebted to all of the Black writers, scholars, thinkers, books, films, and so on that helped me understand my own condition as a non-white person subjected to structural racism while recognizing the differences between my experiences and those of Black people, which are also not monolithic. I am writing with this work as a way of acknowledging and honouring my debts. The more readily circulated anti-racist lists in 2020, which often contain the same three or more titles on repeat, seem to hinge on the assumption that we all require the same modes of instruction or the lessons to move through the world.²⁹While Jackson makes this argument about the anti-racist reading list specifically, a similar feat is in evidence across the “lazier” versions of the anti-racist film lists of the period. But as Smith writes in her manifesto, the books on her lists, some of which can also be found in the 2020 lists, changed, saved, and sustained her life.³⁰Smith, “Human_3.0” The stakes of Black study lie in an ongoing struggle for liberation and, as Robin D. G. Kelley puts it, “a genuine quest to understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge.”³¹Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Long War on Black Studies,” The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2023, https://portside.org/2023-06-25/long-war-black-studies. Human_3.0 Reading List suggests that not all modes of pedagogy are for everyone, and we can draw upon the metaphor of inoculation to interrupt the universalist currents of institutional led imaginings of ‘equity, diversity and inclusion’ that emerged as the vague and often managerial ‘solution’ to anti-Black racism 2020 onwards.³²For an account of the problematic nature of EDI that primarily involves its failures to address structural racism in Canadian universities, see: Rinaldo Walcott, “The End of Diversity,” Public Culture 31, no. 2 (2019): 393-408. The labour of building otherwise and inventive curriculums require us to attend more thoroughly and honestly with these questions of difference and dissonance.³³I reside in the tension of making such a claim when even EDI policies are under attack across the U.S., some pockets in Canada, and elsewhere. In standing by this claim, I am not making the argument that EDI policies should be eradicated but simply that EDI in its current formulation is not enough to build new worlds for mutual flourishing. More needs to be done, not less. 

A List for Liberation

I vividly remember seeing images of murals painted in honour of George Floyd in Gaza and the West Bank that circulated widely on social media in 2020. One of these murals was painted by Bethlehem-based artist Taqi Spateen on the Separation Wall in the West Bank a few weeks after Floyd’s lynching, which he describes as a “gift from Palestine” in an interview with Mondoweiss. 

I want everyone who walks by this wall now to see this mural of George Floyd, and remember him and honor him,” he said. “I want the people in America who see this mural to know that we in Palestine are standing with them, because we know what it’s like to be strangled every day.³⁴Yumna Patel, “Meet the artist who the George Floyd Mural on the Separation Wall,” Mondoweiss, June 11, 2020, https://mondoweiss.net/2020/06/meet-the-artist-who-painted-the-george-floyd-mural-on-the-separation-wall/. 

I never forgot these gestures of transnational solidarity from Palestine to the U.S., driven by the recognition of a commonality of struggle. 

Six years later and it is the question of solidarity with Palestinians subjected to an ongoing genocide in Gaza, alongside the intensification of colonial violence in the West Bank, that has become the fraught and, consequently, among the most shameful questions of our time.³⁵At the time of writing, the state of Israel is also routinely bombing South Lebanon. Shameful precisely because solidarity has been rendered into the form of a question for so many across different parts of the globe and not a given. 

During the past two years, I have occasionally wondered: where are the lists? Where are the lists of books that address anti-Palestinian racism, that celebrate Palestinian cinema, and that detail the historical and ongoing brutalities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine? They certainly exist, but I cannot identify a time where there was a frenzy of list-making and sharing since the genocide began in 2023.³⁶For a cross-section of some of these lists, see: https://palestinecampaign.org/resources/films-about-palestine/; https://www.dutchscholarsforpalestine.nl/films; https://www.plutobooks.com/free-palestine-reading-list/, https://www.haymarketbooks.org/blogs/71-free-palestine-a-reading-list. What comes to mind instead are all of the attempts on too many fronts to be rehearsed here to repress and condemn expressions and acts of solidarity with Palestine alongside other kinds of lists of this period. The blacklists and doxxing sites like Canary Mission that use listing as their method.³⁷For accounts of blacklisting in Hollywood specifically, see: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hollywood-gaza-blacklist-palestine-israel-larb-quarterly-traffic/. The lists of dead Palestinian children.³⁸See: https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/israel-war-on-gaza-10000-children-killed/. The lists of dead Palestinian graduates, their names read in absentia at encampment graduation ceremonies and vigils. 

I do not ask the question of ‘where are the lists?’ to mourn their scarcity or to suggest that a list is an adequate response to genocide. I do not ask this question to draw a facile comparison to the events of 2020. But I do ask this question as a way of indexing a number of disturbing shifts in institutional policies over the last six years that might make one feel nostalgic (almost) for the lists. 

My essay was written in a time of rebellion and mass uprising in America and other parts of the world against policing on a global scale. In addition to the pedagogical possibilities that the anti-racist reading and film lists simultaneously posed and often deflated, these lists and their institutional counterpart, the public statement, were understood by many as acknowledgements of complicity in the perpetuation of anti-Black racism that were sometimes tepid or performative but other times more genuine.³⁹For an overview of some arguments in this vein made by scholars and writers, including Tina Campt and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor see: Guha, “Revisiting Lists.” There is the question now of whether or not some of these statements, for all of their imperfections, could have been issued if the policies of neutrality and impartiality that are being imposed across a number of institutional contexts in Canada and elsewhere were already in place. While the policies that have been adopted in some Canadian universities are not uniform, they share the common goal of shielding the university in question from taking political positions while claiming to protect the academic freedom of university workers by doing so.⁴⁰Universities that have adopted such policies include the University of Windsor, Laurentian University, and my own institution, Carleton University. According to this logic, the neutrality or impartiality of an institution enables university workers to not be.⁴¹For an example of this type of argumentation, see: https://www.policymagazine.ca/the-case-for-institutional-neutrality-at-canadian-universities/. 

Neutrality and impartiality are the enemies of solidarity, which is, in fact, what these policies repress on behalf of the institution and, by extension, university workers despite claims to the contrary. As the President of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) Peter McInnes notes, in actuality, professors and students are facing a startling range of consequences for expressing their solidarity with Palestine.⁴²These remarks can be found in Rumneek Johal, “Academic Freedom at Canadian Universities Threatened as Schools Police Speech on Gaza, Canadian Organization for Faculty Associations Warns,” PressProgress, January 15, 2025, https://pressprogress.ca/academic-freedom-at-canadian-universities-threatened-as-schools-police-speech-on-gaza-canadas-biggest-faculty-association-warns/. Given that much of this contemporary discourse against neutrality and impartiality is rooted in a defence of academic freedom for all, it is very much worth noting, as Brenna Bhandar does, the limitations of such policies that almost uniformly fail to address structural racism and the settler-colonial realities within which the university is situated.⁴³Brenna Bhandar, “A Land Acknowledgement in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption of the Liberal Script,” Middle East Critique 33, no. 3 (2024): 451. As she argues, “[T]his discourse and policy do little to address the radical imbalances in power between people of colour and Indigenous scholars on the one hand, and university administrations on the other.⁴⁴Bhandar, “A Land Acknowledgement,” 451. And at this point, it has become clear in a Canadian context that Palestinian as well as racialized students and scholars face the most harassment for teaching, researching, and expressing solidarity with Palestine.⁴⁵Bhandar, “A Land Acknowledgement,” 455. 

Institutional neutrality is an incredible fallacy and in the context of the university, one that is propped up by appeals to an idealized and universalized academic freedom that does not exist as such in the present. Some proponents of such policies, even when forced to recognize that decisions regarding investments definitively complicate any pretensions towards neutrality, insist that such decisions lie in the hands of boards of governors, trustees, and financial advisors and not with university administrators.⁴⁶Josh Greenberg, “The Case for Institutional Neutrality at Canadian Universities,” Policy: Canadian Politics and Public Policy, September 3, 2025, https://www.policymagazine.ca/the-case-for-institutional-neutrality-at-canadian-universities/. Given the immense power wielded by these entities and figures, it seems disingenuous to claim their wholesale separation from the university proper as much as many of us wished this were the case. There isn’t much room for widespread list-sharing or repetitive institutional statements in an era of imposed neutrality, where even the most benign of gestures towards some kind of recognition of complicity and solidarity is laden with risk that has been manufactured to ensure silence and repression. 

But there is another kind of list that is crucially, for this time, which is the Palestine Film Index. The Index takes the unassuming form of an open-access Google spreadsheet that lists over seven hundred Palestinian films and films made in solidarity with Palestine in chronological order, beginning with the revolutionary period (1968-82) and stretching into the present. Each listing is accompanied by a short description of the film, distributor information, or a link to entire films, many of them made available through the generosity of their makers. The Index also contains links to fifty essential texts on Palestinian film and other Palestine-related material. This Index, as their makers put it, is a labour of love, a gesture of solidarity, and a contribution to the struggle, one that began as a form of file sharing amongst comrades in 2021 that has now been shared with the world since the onset of the genocide in Gaza.⁴⁷See: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1efjyyk6TtaQlZcCvAbpDTUBdw-0ZA6sC/view. While the makers of the Index are not named, tooth (artist and founder of Black Hole Cinematheque) and multi-disciplinary artist Jayce Salloum are known to have assumed an integral role in assembling and maintaining the Index.

 The statement introduces the Index as a list, one that is necessarily partial and thus eschews any pretence to totality that the list as a form portends.⁴⁸See: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1efjyyk6TtaQlZcCvAbpDTUBdw-0ZA6sC/view. This is also a salient argument about the problem with lists posed by Gorfinkel in “Against Lists.” But the Index shows us that a list, even in its inherently compressed form, can be a portal to the ever-expanding cinematic worlds of Palestinian life and resistance. As the writers of this statement explain, it is the world-building capacities of these cultural forms that makes them such a threat to the Occupation, which is exemplified in their relentless targeting of such forms and their makers for erasure and death. This unbearably dark history includes the notorious theft of the PLO archives in Beirut in 1982 and extends to the the routine assassinations of Palestinian artists, filmmakers, writers, journalists, and teachers. They position the list as an “instrument of study, solidarity and resistance” and as “both tool and weapon in this struggle for collective liberation.” The Index takes its place within a global history of militant and revolutionary cinema, as a vessel for dissemination as resistance. The Index ceases to be an ordinary list in circumstances when, as is articulated in the statement, “the acts of filmmaking, preservation and distribution become acts against cultural erasure and genocide.” The Index is an archive and a gateway; an antidote for the blacklists of this time and inoculation for the waves of repression and punishment that keep on coming; a gift of solidarity for the globe and a catalyst for study that helps us defy forced imperatives of neutrality. 

The Index teaches us that some lists can be for liberation. 

Malini Guha

Malini Guha (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University. She is a settler of South Asian descent. Guha is the author of From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Elizabeth Evans) of London as Screen Gateway (Routledge University Press, 2023). Her essays have been published in Feminist Media Histories, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, NECSUS, Screening the Past, PUBLIC: Art |Culture| Ideas and the Journal of British Cinema and Television. She is an editor for the journal Screen. Guha is the current holder of the Ruth and Mark Phillips Professorship in Cultural Mediations at Carleton for her project, “Traction, Flight, Becoming: Geographical Thinking Across Disciplines”.