When heat distorts reality: sunstroke, hallucination and the affective politics of distortion

Abstract

In an era of intensifying extreme heat, bodily exposure to the sun can generate disorienting, hallucinatory experiences historically described as sunstroke. Yet hallucination also names a much broader condition of our time – from AI fabrications to political gaslighting – suggesting we have entered a new era of hallucination where perceptions of reality are increasingly distorted. The remedy to such distortion, we are told, is to cultivate heightened awareness. But this demand presumes a ‘switched-on’ subject that may not actually exist. In this paper, I argue that all perception is, to a degree, hallucinatory, and I explore what this means for geographical theory. Through archival accounts ..