Migration as hope and depression: existential im/mobilities in and beyond Egypt

Abstract

Recent scholarship has asserted that prolonged periods of‘waiting’or‘stuckedness’are becoming the condition of modern capitalism for manypeople. This article complicates this assertion by interrogating the affectivelife of migration, an act which offers the possibility of overcoming, but alsoreinforces, existential stuckedness. Using two ethnographies with youngaspiring male migrants in Egypt, and older migrant men in the Netherlands,we reveal how migration, both before and after physical movement, isexperienced through constant existential oscillation: between‘‘amal’(hope) that the good life is arriving, and‘ikti’āb’(anEgyptianunderstandingof depression) when a new blockage is met. Developing existing under-standings of migratory experience and governance, the article argues thatoscillation emerges out of‘cruel’migratory regimes which perpetually offerup the promise of the good life to aspiring migrants, while inhibiting themeans of achieving it for the majority