This essay investigates the worldly parameters of the Netflix documentary genre. While Netflix on the surface communicates a rhetoric of a truly global vision for media production and circulation, data analysis shows that the documentary genre is still predominantly U.S. American. I use Raymond Williams’ 1975 caution that “genuinely open skies” would be almost impossible to materialize to interpret the implications of this in today’s global landscape. A close analysis of the 2019 Academy Award-winning documentary American Factory, a text that takes the cultural clash between the U.S. and China in the wake of globalization as its subject, reveals the geopolitical stakes of such documentary mediation and imbalance. Combining quantitative and qualitative readings ultimately offers a window onto the tensions between cultural imperialism and globalization in both form and content within the Netflix documentary genre.

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In Mati Diop's film Atlantique, a Senegalese-French-Belgian coproduction from 2019, repeated tracking shots of the Atlantic Ocean gesture at the haunting histories that suture together the US and Senegal. 1 On the surface, Atlantique tackles the ravages of capitalism on a global scale by highlighting labor migration and the latter's disruptive effects on the women left behind, with a focus on the colonial connections between France and Senegal. However, a close reading of the film reveals a more complicated and transnational story, as Atlantique forces us to also think about the United States. In the colonial era, the American continent formed the tragic third corner of the commerce triangulare or triangular trade, the Atlantic economy based on the slave trade. 2 Gorée Island, two miles off the coast of Senegal, has emerged as a focal point of contemporary African American commemoration of the Middle Passage. While the United States is narratively absent both in Atlantique and Diop's 2009 short film Atlantiques, the lingering, extended shots of the ocean that characterize both productions cannot be seen as separate from this earlier traffic. 3 As Diop noted when asked about the significance of this oceanic history, "it was hard not to make connections between these waves of departure. It was very disturbing to me that young men would take these boats and risk their lives to reach Europe, especially when you think the slave trade was the opposite." 4 "Dakar feels like a ghost city to me for that reason," she continued, and the Atlantic Ocean "a very haunted place." 5 The ghosts of the American continent and what it has meant for Senegal and the African continent thus loom large. This element of haunting is made literal in Atlantique. A generically hybrid film that incorporates elements of both African spirituality and the zombie genre, the film follows Ada, a seventeen-year-old Senegalese girl living in Dakar. 6 We first see her as she meets her boyfriend, Souleiman,