Bridging the Mediterranean without papers: Tunisian francophone illiterature’s representation of irregular immigration in the age of globalisation

ABSTRACT

My essay illuminates the plights of those who live on the southern shore of the Mediterranean under the antagonistic forces of globalisation, according to which the free movement of capital between Europe and North Africa is matched by a criminalisation of immigrants from the southern bank. My analysis of the discrepancy between the borderless economics and the bordered movement of people explores the representation of clandestine immigration in Fawzi Mellah’s Clandestin en Méditerranée/Clandestine in the Mediterranean (2000), which depicts illicit passages from North Africa to Europe. Criticising European democracies’ containment of the heralded dynamism of the global age and their diffusion of a discourse feeding fear about migrants, I show that globalisation has turned into a ‘globalization of punitiveness’ [Barker, Vanessa. 2012. ‘Global Mobility and Penal Order: Criminalizing Migration, A View from Europe.’ Sociology Compass 6 (2): 113–121]. My exploration of the migrants featured in the text demonstrates that globalisation’s failure to achieve the spatial decentralisation ideal on which it has based its flat-planet premise makes undocumented immigration the last resort of those to whom the Schengen Area closes its borders. My spatial analysis of the paperless migratory enterprise reads the irregular crossing as an attempt to construct defiant identities that resist the global structure of domination.

KEYWORDS:

• Paperless migration
• globalisation
• Tunisia
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Various ‘illegal’ immigration narratives have been written in French: Mona Latif-Ghattas’s Le Double conte de l’exil (1990), Nasser-Eddine Bekkai Lahbil’s Le Détroit ou le voyage des vaincus (1995), Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du bercail (1998), Hocein Faraj’s L’Aller et le retour (2001), Salim Jay’s Tu ne traverseras pas le Détroit (2001), Moulay Hachem El Amrani’s Hmidou el emigrante (2001), Youcef M.D.’s Je rêve d’une autre vie (2002), Boualem Sansal’s Dis-moi le paradis (2003), Youssef Amghar’s Il était parti dans la nuit (2004), Philippe Claudel’s La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh (2005), Rachid El Hamri’s Le Néant bleu (2005), Boualem Sansal’s Harraga (2005), Samia Shariff’s Le Voile de la peur (2006), Laurent Gaudé’s Eldorado (2006), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2006), El Driss’s Vivre à L’arrache (2006), Hamid Skif’s La Géographie du danger (2006), Ahmed Bouchikhi’s Le Cimetière des illusions (2006), Olivier Adam’s A l’abri de rien (2007), Youssef Jebri’s Le Manuscript d’Hicham, destinées Marocaines (2007a) and Reflexions Clandestines (2007b), Jean Paul Nozière’s Tu ne peux pas rester là (2008), Loriane K’s Le Journal d’une enfant sans papiers (2008), Wali Mohammadi’s De Kaboul à Calais (2009), Marie Ndiaye’s Trois Femmes puissantes (2009), Fabrizio Gatti’s Bilal sur la route des Clandestins (2008), Edem Awumey’s Les pieds Sales (2009), Anne-Laure Bondoux’s Le Temps des miracles (2009), Ronan Badel and Valentine Goby’s Thiên An ou la grande traversée: Du Vietnam à Paris XIIIe (2009), Fatou Diome’s Celles qui attendent (2010), Haydée Sabéran’s Ceux qui passent (2012), Mathias Enard’s La Rue des Voleurs (2012).