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

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 of 19th-century colonial sunstroke, literary expressions of thermal delirium and contemporary reports of heat-stressed agricultural workers, I examine how solar radiation distorts bodily capacities, perceptions and beliefs, moving beyond critical heat studies’ focus on thermal comfort and physical survival. In doing so, drawing on phenomenological and post-phenomenological thought, I develop our understanding of ‘passive affects’ – incoming forces that shape our capacities to sense and evaluate reality. These sunstruck scenes reveal how elemental forces like solar radiation can desubjectify bodies in ways that complicate geographical understandings of power. Rather than viewing distortion as a corruption of truth, I argue that distortion is a primary geographical process through which realities are made, and this has significant implications for how we theorise embodied experience in an overheating world.