Facebook Aesthetics

Abstract

What is the relationship between digital imaginaries and whiteness? Following recent calls to investigate the juncture between whiteness and the internet, this chapter seeks to provide a critique of imagery posted on Facebook in the aftermath of 'terror attacks' in Paris 2015. The author renders these images as structured by deep forms of white world-making, ways of thinking and feeling that reproduce whiteness as ethically superior, innocent, and in need of preserving at the cost of non-white knowledges and peoples. In this chapter, the author argues that the internet provides yet another site for whiteness to engage in white world-making by extending the white gaze to digital platforms in the service of transforming the violence of Paris into a racialised attack on white innocence. As such, the Paris images are understood as responding to and perpetuating a digital imaginary in which the political capacities of images relate to an ethics of violence to the non-white Muslim body.