Twenty-Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

As of January 26, 2024, the French government passed a law to “control immigration and improve integration”, i.e. to harden the country’s policy on illegal immigration. This law and the media discourses that it generated illustrate the common representations of illegal immigration in France. A discourse focused on ideas of biopolitics, neo-liberal capitalism, and on the “usefulness” or “undesirability” of these populations. Against this dehumanizing approach of immigrant bodies as commodities, some French rappers have decided to use rap music to foreground these often-discarded voices to express their subjectivities before and during their migration journey. With his 2022 song Harraga, an Algerian Arabic word referring to clandestine migrants who leave the Maghreb towards Europe, French rapper of Algerian origin Younès provides a first-person narrative of a migration journey inspired by the real tragedy of Moussa Safir who died at sea in 2011. A textual analysis of the lyrics highlights the complexity of the rationale behind illegal immigration more complex than narratives of financial precarity and a certain easiness to uproot oneself. Furthermore, a media and film analysis of the music video complements the diegesis created by the lyrics through the foregrounding of recurring motifs, notably of the sea as both protective and deadly, and the shrewd use of camera movements to complexify immigrants’ subjectivities. Through this transmedia analysis, this study recenters immigrants’ stories, and highlights the complexity of their migration journey before they even make it, if they do, to their destination.