The Black Altantic and the Politics of Self-Representation in the Cinema: A Critical Analysis of Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019)

Lecture & Film “Black Atlantic Cinema”

Lecture: Femi Shaka (Port Harcourt)

Paul Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic (1993), is cardinal to an understanding of the “ideas of the nation, nationality, national belonging, and nationalism” as experienced by blacks in the diaspora. But as Zeleza (2005) noted, “Gilroy’s central concern was to deconstruct the idea of the black race, to divorce it from any African essence or presence, to demonstrate its fluidity, mutability and modernity, and that black Atlantic cultural identities emerged in transnational and intercultural spaces of the diasporic experience itself.” This is where the work becomes problematic. Mati Diop’s film, Atlantics (2019) offers a starting point for a critical discussion of how members of the refugee diasporas are represented in the cinema.

Femi Shaka is professor of cinema studies at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Film: Atlantics, Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Belgium 2019, 105 min.