The Unsacred and the Spectacularized: Alan Kurdi and the Migrant Body

Abstract

While images can provide a transformative experience, they can also become objects of virtual voyeurism, functioning within regimes of representation while possessing the power to resist dominant ideologies. This article examines this phenomenon of “claiming the dead and dispossessing them” through the case study of Alan Kurdi who became an iconic symbol representing the trauma of people fleeing conflict zones in the Middle East. As an iconic image, it raised awareness of the plight of the Syrian refugees, but the image also became locked into a “sensorium” (Rancière) where it created communion through its pathos but equally was trapped into an aesthetic regime which re-centered the migrant body as a new type of (in)humanity in Europe. The Internet as a platform for this sensorium constantly re-appropriates iconic imagery into new artistic and creative formats where images can be stripped from context, re-hashed, and endlessly circulated as cultural artifacts, bearing the burden of history yet being disenfranchised from it.