When Globalization Leaves People Behind: Postcolonial Identity, Fiction, and Resistance in Atlantics

Assigned articles: Dilip Barad, “Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies,” and “Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations”
Film: Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019)
Key concepts: global capitalism, market fundamentalism, transnational networks, hybridity, migration, cultural identity, resistance, and social justice

Cover of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire
Figure 1. Cover of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a theoretical text discussed in Barad’s articles. Image source: Harvard University Press; used for educational reference.

Introduction: reading globalization through postcolonial critique

The two assigned articles ask us to look beyond the idea that globalization simply means greater connection. In “Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies,” Dilip Barad examines the New American Empire, the Global War on Terror, economic institutions, technology, and transnational power. He argues that colonial histories remain active even when domination operates through international networks rather than one visible empire. “Globalization and Fiction” shifts from theory to narrative, showing how fiction makes these systems visible through economic dominance, protest, injustice, cultural conflict, and identity crisis.

Mati Diop’s Atlantics provides a particularly rich film through which to read both articles. Set in Dakar, Senegal, the film begins with construction workers who have not received their wages for months. Frustrated by exploitation and the absence of a secure future, several young men leave by boat for Spain. The story, however, follows mainly the women who remain behind, especially Ada, who is in love with Souleiman but is expected to marry Omar. Through its ocean imagery, multilingual and transnational setting, supernatural transformation, and focus on unpaid labour, Atlantics shows that globalization produces both connection and abandonment. My argument is that the film reshapes postcolonial identity as a struggle over who is allowed to move, who is left behind, and who has the power to narrate the meaning of global change.

Globalization beyond the centre and the margin

Barad begins with a problem in traditional postcolonial analysis. Centre and margin remain useful for colonial domination, but they cannot fully describe a world in which capital, media, technology, labour, and political authority cross borders. Drawing on Loomba and Hardt and Negri, he presents contemporary Empire as a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus” operating through networks and flexible hierarchies (Barad, “Future” 187–88). This does not make the world equal; it makes domination less visible by distributing it through corporations, finance, digital systems, military alliances, and market policies.

The construction tower in Atlantics visualizes this networked power. It is a futuristic development project, but the workers who build it are excluded from its prosperity. Their unpaid labour reveals globalization’s contradiction: development depends on postcolonial bodies while its rewards are concentrated elsewhere. The futuristic tower therefore repeats an old colonial pattern in which value is extracted from the Global South and transferred upward.

Stiglitz’s criticism of “market fundamentalism,” discussed by Barad, is also relevant. Market fundamentalism treats the market as a universal solution and assumes that growth will eventually benefit everyone, even when wealth is already unequal. In Atlantics, the tower promises a modern skyline while its manager refuses to pay the workers who create it. The supposedly rational market appears instead as anger, poverty, grief, and dangerous migration.

Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” argument suggests that technology and global supply chains have made the world more interconnected. Stiglitz responds that the world may be becoming “less flat” because inequality is increasing (Barad, “Future” 189–90). Atlantics dramatizes this unevenness: capital and designs circulate across borders, but the workers cannot safely follow the opportunities created by that circulation. For them, the ocean is a deadly border.

Globalization and the remaking of postcolonial identity

Globalization reshapes identity because it changes the relationship between local belonging and global aspiration. The young men in Atlantics are not outside the global economy. They are already connected to it through construction, consumer culture, technology, and dreams of Europe. Yet they experience this connection as exclusion. They see an international future but cannot access it through secure work or legal mobility. Their identities are divided between Dakar, which is home but economically restrictive, and Europe, which appears as a space of possibility but can be reached only through extreme risk.

This produces a form of hybridity. The young people are neither simply traditional subjects nor fully assimilated global citizens. They inhabit an unstable cultural space shaped by migration, media, class, colonial history, romance, and religious and family expectations. Diop’s film does not present hybridity as an easy celebration of cultural mixture. It shows that hybrid identities can be created through unequal power. The desire to leave is not merely personal ambition; it is a symptom of a system that makes the local future appear impossible.

The film’s gender perspective deepens this identity crisis. Instead of centring only the men who leave for Europe, Diop follows Ada and the women left behind. NPR emphasizes that their lives are transformed by absence and loss [3]. Ada is caught between her love for Souleiman and an arranged marriage to Omar, whose family has greater economic security. Omar can move legally between Senegal and Italy, while Souleiman risks an undocumented crossing. Class, gender, nationality, and legal status determine who can participate safely in globalization.

Poster for Mati Diop's film Atlantics
Figure 2. Poster for Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019). Image source: The Movie Database poster record; used for educational reference.

Fiction as a critique of globalization

Barad’s second article argues that fiction is a critical form that exposes what economic language hides. His examples include DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, Newman’s The Fountain at the Center of the World, McEwan’s Saturday, Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and Adiga’s The White Tiger. These works connect global structures to individual lives. Barad also describes protest as the visible surface of deeper inequality, a transnational movement with shared aims, a diverse and fragmentary process, and a struggle rooted in resistance to industrial, agrarian, and colonial capitalism (Barad, “Fiction” 182–84).

Atlantics translates these ideas from literary fiction into a visual narrative. The unpaid workers’ decision to leave is a movement in miniature. Its immediate cause is missing wages, but its deeper causes are class inequality, exploitative development, limited employment, and unequal mobility. The men do not form a formal organization, yet their departure exposes structural problems beneath everyday life. Migration is both an individual decision and a collective symptom.

The film’s supernatural turn develops Barad’s idea that marginalized experience can become a form of resistance. After the men disappear, the women are possessed by djinn. They move through Dakar at night, enter the spaces of the wealthy, and confront the employer who has refused to pay the workers. The ghosts make an invisible debt visible. The economy treated the men’s labour as expendable, but the women’s bodies return that suppressed claim to the centre of public attention.

Watch the Trailer

Official trailer published by Netflix. If the embedded video is unavailable in your region, use the direct YouTube link above.

This resistance is diverse and fragmentary. The women have different personalities and circumstances, yet share an objective: recognition of the stolen wages and the right to act beyond assigned social roles. Their action crosses romance, marriage, work, gender, and class. It is not a perfect revolution, but it shows how resistance can emerge from ordinary relationships when the employer, police, family, and marriage system fail to protect them.

Diop’s form is politically significant. The film moves between social realism, romance, migration drama, African spirituality, and the ghost genre. This generic hybridity refuses the expectation that a film about Senegalese migration must be a documentary-like tragedy for Western viewers. It allows the women to become agents of mystery rather than objects of pity. Enzerink describes Atlantics as a Senegalese-French-Belgian coproduction spoken largely in Wolof and argues that its oceanic imagery links contemporary migration to colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, and economic imperialism [2]. The film thus challenges both the market and the cultural systems that decide which stories are globally intelligible.

Diagram showing unpaid labour leading to debt, Atlantic crossing, absence, and collective resistance in Atlantics
Figure 3. In *Atlantics*, unpaid labour becomes debt and migration, while absence returns as collective resistance. Original visual created for this blog.

The digital and ecological future of postcolonial studies

Barad’s discussion of Globalization 4.0 adds a contemporary dimension. Schwab describes digital technologies, production, governance, and biological life as increasingly connected, while Barad emphasizes ecological limits, multipolar geopolitics, and rising inequality. Atlantics does not depict artificial intelligence directly, but its tower asks what happens when modern development is celebrated without justice. A new skyline cannot be called progress if its workers remain unpaid.

Postcolonial thought must also move beyond economics because globalization enters intimate life. It affects whom Ada can marry, where Souleiman can work, and how families understand respectability. It shapes cultural circulation too: a Senegalese film spoken in Wolof travels through festivals and Netflix to global audiences. Enzerink argues that this complicates older models in which culture moves only from West to East [2]. Atlantics participates in globalization while challenging its cultural hierarchy.

Conclusion

The two articles provide a strong framework for Atlantics. The first explains how global power has become transnational, networked, technologically mediated, and unequal. The second shows how fiction turns these systems into personal experience, social conflict, and resistance. Diop’s film joins both perspectives by presenting mobility beside danger, cultural hybridity beside economic exclusion, and connection beside abandonment.

The film’s ghosts suggest that what globalization makes invisible does not disappear. Unpaid labour, colonial history, restricted agency, and migrant dreams return as demands for recognition. Postcolonial thought must ask not only whether the world is connected, but how, under whose terms, and at whose cost. Atlantics answers through an ocean that is beautiful, historical, commercial, dangerous, and haunted. A just global future cannot treat postcolonial people as disposable labour; connection requires dignity, economic justice, cultural authority, and the right to imagine a future at home.

Works Cited

Barad, Dilip. “Globalization and Fiction: Exploring Postcolonial Critique and Literary Representations.” Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 177–185. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376371617_GLOBALIZATION_AND_FICTION_EXPLORING_POSTCOLONIAL_CRITIQUE_AND_LITERARY_REPRESENTATIONS.

Barad, Dilip. “Globalization and the Future of Postcolonial Studies.” Journal of Higher Education and Research Society, vol. 10, no. 2, Oct. 2022, pp. 186–200. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376374570_GLOBALIZATION_AND_THE_FUTURE_OF_POSTCOLONIAL_STUDIES.

Diop, Mati, director. Atlantics. Performances by Mame Bineta Sane, Amadou Mbow, Traore, Nicole Sougou, and Aminata Kane, Netflix, 2019.

Enzerink, Sarah Christine. “Black Atlantic Currents: Mati Diop’s Atlantique and the Field of Transnational American Studies.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2021, pp. 53–71. University of California eScholarship, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4k3816ts.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674006713.