Visualizing Lhreg : undocumented migration, social death, viscerality, and digital spectacle in Morocco

This study analyses the emotional drives to undocumented migration (lhreg) in Morocco. Lhreg is a phenomenon whose socially widespread appeal reflects a simmering feeling of worthlessness, especially among Moroccan youth. It embodies a widespread experience of social death. To understand how social death fuels lhreg, we apply the concept of ‘experiential respatialization’ to capture lhreg’s ritualistic character. Lhreg is a ‘ritual of dying’ because death is a constant in hraga’s visceral experience. We argue that to become a hrag (pl. hraga) involves rethinking social space and geography. Reimagination is the first phase in this ritual, followed by passage and unpredictability that together culminate in becoming. Hraga are constantly on the edge of living/dying, alternating uneasily between dying and death, settled thereby by ‘dying to live’. This article engages with local artists’ iconographies on lhreg. Digitality has created a new space for cartoonists and hraga to challenge the state’s narrative of border security and economic development, triggering an emotional discourse that speaks to hraga’s social unrecognition as products of walo (lack). This paper theorizes lhreg through ‘counter-visual necropolitics’, showing how platformed visual culture appropriates and contests the necropolitical couple of neoliberal dispossession and border securitization that produces hraga’s social death.