Rosalind Galt — Anticolonial inheritances: Mati Diop and the spirits of African cinema
A still from Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)
This paper will focus on French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop, reading her feature film Atlantics and its short predecessor in relation to the inheritances of African cinemas of liberation. Diop has a well-known familial connection to history of post-liberation cinema, as her uncle was Djibril Diop Mambety, and her film Mille Soleils directly engages the contemporary resonances of his film Touki Bouki. However, this generational inheritance is not a question of a young female filmmaker being defined in relation to an older male relative. Rather, Diop’s work takes on the question of postcolonial inheritance more broadly: for engaged cinemas, for the diasporic transits of Africa and Europe, and for Black women—both onscreen and behind the camera. In Atlantics, inheritance is imagined most strikingly through the figure of the revenant: spirits of men who have drowned in attempting perilous ocean journeys to Spain, and whose return to haunt the women they left behind asserts a powerful political aesthetic. Atlantics’ ghosts participate in a history of indigenous haunting across the Black Atlantic, from the Senegalese faru rab to the Arab jinn to the Haitian zombie. This paper argues that Diop’s film understands these spirits as a form of anticolonial realism, capable of rendering visible the affective depths of the Atlantic ocean: they bespeak the ocean’s unimaginable archive of Black death, as well as envisioning beauty and grace in contemporary Black life. This is also a cinematic history, traced in the films of postcolonial liberation and those of migration and diaspora. In reimagining the inheritance of these journeys, Diop’s films pose questions for thinking about global solidarity and contemporary world cinema.
BIO
Rosalind Galt is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. Her most recent monograph is Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization (Columbia UP, 2021), and her other books include Queer Cinema in the World (coauthored with Karl Schoonover, Duke UP, 2016) and Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (Columbia UP, 2011). She is also the coeditor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (OUP, 2010). Her research focuses on the relationships between film aesthetics and global geopolitics, with a particular interest in gender and sexuality.