Abstract
This thesis investigates the role of multimedia storytelling during the 2018–2019 Sudanese Revolution, examining how Sudanese artists and activists construct meaning, preserve memory, and sustain resistance in the digital age. The first section analyzes four documentary films—Heroic Bodies (2022), The Salon (2023), Bougainvillea (2025), and Sudan, Remember Us (2024)—arguing that these works aren't simply reflections of revolution but active participants, functioning as aftershocks that deploy ripples of political mimesis, critical fabulation, and embodied testimony to pressure power and build counter-archives against state erasure. The second section turns to Instagram, analyzing Sudan Tape Archive and Sudan Updates as sites of creative appropriation and record keeping, wherein users repurpose the platform's affordances beyond their intended use to preserve rhythmic memory, share on-the-ground reporting, and connect a vast diaspora. Drawing on Elizabeth Ellcessor's Access Kit framework and theories of creative citizenship, I argue that in the face of authoritarian erasure and ongoing war, the struggle to document has become coextensive with the struggle for liberation itself. Written from my position as a Sudanese American researcher, this thesis seeks to give power back to those from whom it has been stripped, insisting that Sudan be remembered not as a war-torn casualty but as a civilization still fighting, still creating, still here.
