Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies

Abstract

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,

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“…Diop, thereof, captures the enthralling sound and imagery of the waves accordingly and furnishes the narrative with this omniscient and magnetic presence by the ocean. in this sense, it is possible to read this leitmotif as a social allegory since the Atlantic Ocean bears historical connotations for Africans (Enzerink 2021). The island of Gorée, 7 a place located near Dakar, is one of the first known destinations where the slave trade has begun, and the Atlantic Ocean itself was a road to this slavery, servitude and subjugation.…”