Implicated and “Unwilling” Labours of Mediterranean Migration in Francesca Mannocchi’s Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente (2019)

Abstract

 Using as its lens Francesca Mannocchi’s second-hand autobiography of a Libyan people trafficker, Io Khaled vendo uomini e sono innocente (2019), this article examines the position of the trafficker within the intersecting regimes of labour in the Mediterranean in the C21st. Khaled’s testimony challenges the reader to reflect critically upon how a citizen of Libya might construct agency within an environment of relentless oppression by means of exploitative labour. This challenge is contextualized within research across disciplines into the complex border that the contemporary Mediterranean Sea has been made to constitute (De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) and in response to a forensic oceanography study by Heller and Pezzani (2017) identifying the sea itself as being implicated as an ‘unwilling killer’, like Khaled, in this externally-generated field of tension. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability (2016), the article posits trafficking, like migrant mobility, as a basis for acts of resistance.