African Boats and Scenes of Mourning in the Postcolonial Black Atlantic

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Ayo Coly (Dartmouth)

In this presentation, I query the trope of the African migrant boat in recent African cinemas. The trope has emerged in response to the phenomenon of the so-called “death-boats” that attempt to smuggle African migrants and refugees across the Atlantic to Europe. My presentation reads the trope in conversation with scholarship on the Black Atlantic and on modalities of mourning in the wake of the Middle Passage.

Ayo A. Coly holds the Class of 1925 Chair at Dartmouth College where she is a Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies.

Film: The Pirogue, Moussa Toure, Artmattan Productions, Senegal 2013, 87 min.