The Memory of Futures Past in the Postcolonial Imagination: A Hauntological Reading of Mati Diop’s Atlantics

Abstract

This paper analyzes Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics through the lens of hauntology, primarily drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher. Diop identifies the ways in which the spectral presence of Senegal’s colonial past continues to haunt the present through the diametric symbols of the Muejiza Tower and the Ocean, motifs of modern digital pervasiveness, and the anxiety of inherited cinematic traditions. The argument concludes by stating that the film’s final scene—in which Ada, the film’s protagonist, smiles at the camera—resists ironic or sincere readings but instead settles comfortably within its unresolved tension.