ABSTRACT
What is the role of mimetics when it transmutes through the body of a dead innocent child? Children can transcend race yet become emblematic of our inability to feel for one another. The dead imagery of Alan Kurdi and his resurrection as a memetic encounter online is explored in this chapter which traces the aesthetic of the corpse and its ability to redistribute senses as a meme and its sensory articulation infusing dialectical readings. It can invoke the racialized ‘migrant race’ through the dead child. Art, representation and the aesthetic of dead migrants as a sensorium for the internet is interrogated through the iconic image of Alan Kurdi. The iconic dead and their transformative tendencies to mutate through the memetics of the digital is foregrounded through the politics of Fortress Europe in this case study.
