Transatlantic Crossings: Madubuko Diakité and Black Radical Documentary

This article traces the transatlantic crossings and overlooked career of the expatriate Black American filmmaker Madubuko Diakité and analyzes his limited but rich body of work. It argues that Diakité should be understood as part of an internationalism grounded in the Black radical tradition but irreducible to fixed identity categories. It also contends that Diakité’s work is boundary-crossing in an aesthetic sense: by infusing the moving image with a polyvocal, socio-aesthetic sounding—a poetics of sonic displacement—Diakité unsettles the racial regime of representation and opens new fugitive pathways.