Spectropolitics, the agency of the Atlantic ghosts: utopia of resurgence in Atlantique by Matia Diop and L’Archipel du Chien by Philippe Claudel

While Black Lives Matter protests continue to resonate around the world, the silence surrounding black lives lost at sea remains strikingly persistent. Two migration narratives bring drowned Sub-Saharans back from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean: the parable L’Archipel du Chien (2018) written by French novelist and film director Philippe Claudel and the feature film Atlantique (2019) directed by French-Senegalese Mati Diop. The presence of black corpses haunts the inhabitants of the island as much as the absence of bodies haunts the grieving widows of Dakar, whilst the castaways permeate both landscapes and psyches, seizing minds and elements alike. By transcending the modern binaries of individualism and communalism, mind and body, living and dead, Claudel and Diop’s otherworldly fictions blur all borders by drawing a world ‘other’: a utopian space, that is radically open, that resists the politics of closure and impossibility underpinning neoliberal democracies and racialised oppression, which currently drive border policies and makes migrants acutely vulnerable. In this space, migrant ghosts do not merely haunt; they act. I propose the term spectropolitics to describe this agency as a force of resurgence, an offensive care to the politics of death that dominates Europe’s response to the refugee crisis. This article explores how narrative practices, viewed through the lenses of ethics, political philosophy and ecocriticism, can reframe our understanding of human mobility. Specifically, I examine how resurgence from and by the Sub-Saharan revenants offers a relational ethics of care. Ultimately, I argue that the power of narrative lies in its capacity to expand our sense of the possible by actively shaping our reality, a capacity that is ethically vital when confronting the lived experiences of displacement and mourning.