Facebook Remittances XII

 Once a student of mine said: "Professor, on your Insta, you really are Orientalistic, you only post pictures of you with black and asian people". This sentence was powerful. It made me ponder self-depiction online and the never-ending issue of assessing people's intentions. It also made me realize how non-communitarian (hence non-conventional) my surroundings were in Kuwait. Did the student mean that there were not enough White people on my Insta for a French person? Because, and this is what I told her, there were probably as few white or French people as there were Kuwaitis or Arabs in my pictures. Was the problem the blackness or Asianness, the lack of Arabness, or the lack of Whiteness? 

I just answered: but these people were my friends!

I didn't really have any friends in Kuwait, aside from my crazy Lebanese family, two American colleagues, my strange Indian ex, and my friends-informants, whom I used to meet the most. The rest would basically ghost and ignore. That's a thing over there.

Indeed, I found that it was much more interesting to post about all the initiatives the NGO would do than the sheesha I would smoke with my other buddies. And I had love for my friends-informants. And reversely, my friends-informants are so prolific on social media, much more than the other people I knew; sometimes taking my phone to take pictures without me on it (the camera quality was the point). Every Friday evening, we would find each other in hundreds of images and selfies on one another's accounts online, holding the rest of the week through these pics until the next meeting on Friday to take pictures again. These picture times were social and vital. From the eyes of my student, my Insta aesthetic was not making sense (digital platforms as media also contribute to shaping what we consider making sense on a given one - Insta dream holidays esthetics), leading also to my affection for my friends-informants not making sense either: I think it was just not on the table. Instead, she argued, I was constructing an image of a righteous-humanitarian kind of white person (thus, I would add, denying my capacity for non-vertical affects towards my informants). 

Now the question is: from a reflexive point of view, what does researching migrant labor in the Gulf racially mean / can it mean something else?