‘Mixed migration’: Cursed journeys and dystopian narratives in Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics and Walid Amri’s Les Papillons de Lampedusa: Traverseurs Clandestins

This article examines shipwreck fiction through the lens of cultural studies and decolonial theory, focusing on the representation of archetypal migrant figures and their complex, often traumatic journeys across the desert and the Mediterranean Sea in Abu Bakr Khaal’s African Titanics (2014) and Walid Amri’s Les Papillons de Lampedusa: Traverseurs Clandestins (2023). Moving beyond the reductive classifications of migrants as merely ‘refugees’ or ‘economic migrants’ – categories that fail to capture the complexity of their lived experiences – this study centres on the concept of ‘mixed migrations’. In doing so, it challenges dominant narratives surrounding migration in North Africa, particularly Tunisia, and seeks to offer a more humanizing portrayal of both individual and collective experiences of those who risk their lives on the so-called ‘death boats’. Drawing on trauma studies and Patricia McManus’s concept of ‘negative commitment to the present’, the article foregrounds a current mode of dystopia that is intrinsically connected to the legacies of the past. This endeavour also demonstrates how African Titanics and Les Papillons de Lampedusa: Traverseurs Clandestins employ metaphors, allegories and hybrid genres to construct narratives from within – aesthetic forms that resist and reimagine the liminal and often violent border regimes shaping current migration debates. Ultimately, the analysis reveals how these texts illuminate the intrinsic links between migration and broader systemic issues such as war and conflict, dictatorship, terrorism, poverty, climate change and the unequal distribution of global wealth between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’.