The Ghost in the (Migrant) Machine: Living-deadness and resistance in Mati Diop’s Atlantique

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the ghostly routes and bodies of contemporary migrations through the reading of the 2019 film directed by French-Senegalese director Mati Diop, Atlantique, while exploring the inseparability of the political economy of migration from the material reality of people crossing lands and seas. The film tells a (ghost) story of migration and vindication of the seemingly powerless, haunting the distances and the intimacies between continents and within colonial relations, and centering on the gendered body, as monstruous and (therefore) resistant.