Editing as Diasporic Thought

Khalid Shamis

January 2026

“Cultural identity is not fixed. It is a moving feast.”
Hall, 2017: 210

“Space is the place.”
Sun Ra, 1974

“Oh the places and spaces I’ve been.”
Donald Byrd, 1975

Diaspora is never finished. It is always becoming. Unsettling, reforming, breaking apart, reconstituting. So too is the edit. Each cut is a refusal and an embrace. A keeping, a discarding, a reordering of what is gathered. Between each frame lies not only the latent possibility of a story but the echo of all the stories that might have been. The paths considered, abandoned, or forgotten do not disappear, they hum beneath the final cut like an undertow. That hum is diasporic, the vibration of what is present and what cannot be retrieved.

Harun Farocki described the editing room as a place of “in-between,” a threshold space where meaning is neither fixed nor fully dissolvable. This in-betweenness mirrored, for me, the diasporic condition itself. Coming of age in London between cultures, languages, mythologies, and unspoken griefs, the edit room became more than a technical sanctuary. It opened what Homi Bhabha would call a “third space,” a generative site where the fragments of self, lineage, and belonging could be rearranged, reinterpreted, even mourned. Within that dark room something unpredictable and at times sacred was taking place, I was learning to inhabit the process of becoming, not as a temporary phase but as a mode of existence.

Diasporic life is one of a beginning in scattering, with a rupture so deep that the aftershocks reverberate across generations. The edit, too, starts with fragments, scenes detached from context, moments separated from continuity, images carrying their own internal storms. As I arrange my own images of my self and lineage, I begin to understand the quiet mourning embedded inside. But in bringing scattered images into relation, mourning slowly shifted into meaning. A sense of coherence, not completeness but relation, began to emerge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss once wrote of the human condition as being “complete and incomplete at the same time.” For diasporic subjects, this tension is heightened, lived daily. We belong to two or more worlds and yet to none. We negotiate multiple histories while being claimed fully by none. The edit room is one of the rare places where this contradiction becomes productive. Like the diaspora, editing requires an acceptance that coherence is built from incompletion, that identity, personal, political and historical, must be crafted from fragments.

Documentary editing and diasporic existence share an architecture. Both require reconciling multiplicity. Both ask, ‘What do we hold on to? What do we let go of? Which absences must remain visible, and which silences must we honour?’ In editing, as in diaspora, memory is neither a neutral archive nor a stable ground. It is a dynamic negotiation between the pull of origins and the push of new terrains. Weaving diverse perspectives into narrative parallels the way diasporic individuals weave between traditions and contemporary realities, constructing hybrid identities that are deeply temporal and spatial.

To understand personal or political histories through film, the editing space must be protected. It must resist the pressures of speed, producibility, and market logic. It must function not as a factory of stories but as a sanctuary of relation, a relational space where histories can be held without exploitation, where images can reveal their truths slowly, where the editor and director can sit with the weight of what is unfolding. In this sense, the edit becomes an intimate diasporic practice, a place where dislocation, multiplicity, rupture, and return are navigated collaboratively. This collaborative dimension is itself diasporic. When an editor enters a project, they absorb not only footage but also the emotional and political resonances held within it. A moment arrives, inevitably, of image exhaustion. In this exhaustion lies revelation. Independent interpretations arise, meanings multiply. The editor notices what the director could not see and the camera held. They propose alternatives that destabilise the initial vision. This is the point where trust becomes essential, where hierarchy must loosen. In diasporic life, too, identity emerges most fruitfully in the relational spaces where authority gives way to conversation.

The director typically reaches the editor after a long pilgrimage, years of gathering, filming, failing, searching for funds, searching for themselves. They arrive with the burden of what they have witnessed and the fear of what may not translate. They speak, explain, justify. They recount political contexts, production logistics, aesthetic compromises, and personal crises. During this initial rite of entry, the editor listens, not only to the words but to the silences between them, to what the director cannot yet see in their own footage. As the material is ingested and arranged, patterns begin to reveal themselves. Footage starts “thinking” about itself, offering clues to its own meaning-making. The director, if they trust the process, slowly relinquishes control. The footage begins to direct them. This is diasporic, to follow rather than force meaning, to allow fragments to lead the way toward coherence.

Images carry scars. Not every frame is pristine; not every record is aligned. The “poor image,” as Hito Steyerl writes, “tends toward abstraction.” It is the beginning of a visual idea, not its polished end. The poor image, compressed, distorted, displaced, mirrors the condition of the displaced subject. It carries with it the traces of journeys, of losses, of translations and retranslations. To work with such images is to accept that clarity is not always the goal; sometimes opacity is necessary for truth.

Editing as diasporic thought means embracing the fragment as a mode of knowing. It means honouring the unresolved as part of the narrative. It means acknowledging that images, like people, cross borders, lose context, and must be re-situated gently. It means understanding that stories, like identities, are never finished. The edit room is a site of return, but not a return to origins. Rather, it is a return to relation, a return to the possibility of making meaning from fragments, of holding grief and creativity together, of crafting identities that remain open, flexible, and multiple. In this way, the edit becomes not only a technical process but a profound act of diasporic living. Through it, we think with the past, reimagine the present, and gesture toward futures that acknowledge displacement yet refuse erasure.

In editing, as in diaspora, we become ourselves by piecing together what remains, by giving form to what persists, and by allowing the in-between spaces, the cuts, the pauses, the silences, to speak.

Khalid Shamis

Khalid is a London-born, Libyan–South African documentary director, producer, editor, and educator based in Cape Town. With over 25 years of experience, his work spans independent long-form documentaries across Africa, the Middle East, and the UK. He is deeply engaged in story construction, working closely with directors and first-time filmmakers to shape films that are led by the material and the voices within it.

Khalid is a member of the South African Guild of Editors, a PhD candidate in Visual History at the University of the Western Cape, and the founder of Rough Cut Lab Africa , the continent’s only edit lab dedicated to developing African documentary stories.