How do transnational circulations affect the everyday practices and social imaginaries of individuals who are restrained from movement due to political, economic or social conditions? In scholarly discussions on globalization and transnationalism, the figures of the immigrant, the refugee, and the tourist have become axiomatic, that is, persons who have undergone a process of voluntary or forced re-location. However, much less has been written about individuals who have been prevented from movement for political, social or economic reasons. Contemporary Tunisia provides an especially instructive context for this analysis due to recent immigration policies and increased border vigilance that have decreased the likelihood of transnational emigration (Collyer 2008). This paper aims to forge new ethnographic and analytic territory by examining the socio-spatial imaginaries of Tunisian working-class men and unemployed youth who have been unsuccessful at fulfilling their stated intentions and ambitions of transnational emigration motivated by high rates of national unemployment. Through discourse analysis, this paper outlines the contours of a socio-spatial imaginary as expressed in the course of a series of interviews conducted with would-be emigrants in the coffeehouses of contemporary urban Tunis. Interview data analyzed in this paper was collected during two years of ethnographic field research in the coffeehouses of inner city Tunis from 2005-2008. Data from these interviews index the unevenness of transnational flows and evidence a tension between the limits of everyday practice and the reach of a socio-spatial imagination. In this manner, the paper proposes the thesis that the coffeehouse provides a locus for transfigurative action that mitigates the constraints of socio-economic realities. Interviewees referred to this process as ‘’amal jaw’ or, ‘making air.’ Consequently, the paper highlights the role of the imagination for the Tunisian coffeehouse habitué as a critical instrument in both alleviating as well as exacerbating the anxieties of contemporary experiences of social anomie. The paper builds on recent scholarly contributions to the discussion of the imagination (Castoriadis 1998; Crapanazano 2004; Mittermaier 2006; Taylor 2002) and draws on theoretical anthropological debates on the dynamics of circulation (Appadurai 1988; Latour 1999; Lee & LiPuma 2002; Povinelli & Gaonkar 2003).