The spirits of African cinema: redemptive aesthetics in Mati Diop's Atlantics

In Mati Diop's Atlantics (2019), the ghosts of young Senegalese men who have drowned trying to sail to Europe return to haunt their girlfriends in Dakar. The film's mise-en-scène is suffused with images and sounds of the ocean. The Atlantic forms the horizon of narrative possibility for the film's desperate young men, but it also forms the cinematic material of a stranger and more joyful accounting of precarity, loss, and redemption. Here, Galt argues that style in Atlantics is legible as an articulation of Black histories, anticolonial aesthetics, diasporic identities, and queer feminism. Its antirealist aesthetic of ghostly haunting encodes both an atmosphere of loss and a reparative politics of Black life.