Distressed: Migrant underworlds and travels in hyporeality

Abstract

Based on fieldwork among Ghanaian labor migrants in Italy, this article explores the experiential reality of migrant underworlds in contrast to Baudrillard's still topical, but ultimately flawed, notion of hyperreality. To West African migrants, reality is not disintegrating and being substituted with codes and simulation, as Baudrillard would have it. Rather, these migrants are shackled by an excess of relentless reality. Consumed by the demands of this moment and the next, migrants increasingly inhabit hyporeal worlds where distances grow, obstacles become insurmountable, and the waiting becomes endless. Yet, these migrant underworlds are intimately linked to the privileged and hyperreal world of play and consumption through the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the gadgets we use. The pervasiveness of precarious migrant work situations and the normalization of suffering is not an accident or an aberration but the logical underside of the globalized market economy. Living and working in hyporeality, a widespread and mundane experience, this article argues, has certain implications for migrants’ sense of time, space, and agency.