Visa flesh: postphenomenology, kafala infrastructures, and embodied precarity in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s <i>Temporary People</i>

This article offers a postphenomenological reading of South Asian labour migration to the Gulf through Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People. I argue that the novel theorises what I call visa flesh: a condition in which the migrant body is made legible, governable, and exploitable through the infrastructures of kafala – ID systems, camp routines, worksite technologies, transport, and digital communication. Bringing postphenomenology into dialogue with Judith Butler’s account of politically distributed precarity and Brian Larkin’s account of infrastructure as material and sensory form, the article shows that Gulf precarity cannot be reduced to wages, contracts, or legal status alone. It is also produced through everyday mediations that reorganise perception, movement, recognition, and exposure. Rather than using migration scholarship to validate fiction, the essay uses empirical work to frame the institutional conditions that Unnikrishnan’s formal experimentation renders newly perceptible. Close reading of embodied, hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations demonstrates how the novel makes infrastructural violence sensible at the level of rhythm, atmosphere, and bodily fragmentation.