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Reviews


— Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Reader in Digital Politics, King's College London

May, 2024

While memes have become a mainstay of our everyday experience on social media, we rarely reflect on what they tell us about contemporary culture. Cristina Moreno-Almeida adopts an original path to explore this global issue and its political implications, by focusing on the subcultural and political use of memes in Morocco. Reviewing countless examples and situating them in their live cultural context, Moreno-Almeida demonstrates memes' rootedness in popular culture and their role as point of contact between mass cultural consumption and online vernaculars... memes emerge as "monsters", fictitious, yet disturbingly all-real creatures, which reveal important insights about our perceptions of the world and the hidden structures of society. * Dr Paolo Gerbaudo, Reader in Digital Politics, King's College London *

— Prof. Shakuntala Banaji, Professor of Media Culture and Social Change, London School of Economics and Political Science

May 2024

Cristina Moreno-Almeida's Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque is an astonishingly lucid, complex and insightful book, adding both to our understanding of the ambit of memes within digital culture more broadly but also to our knowledge of political cultures of the grotesque in North Africa. A rich seam of original evidence moves us from horror and uncomfortable affect in culture to the role of digital visuality as a hidden transcript which engages with, critiques, or shores up power at a specific historical juncture. This is going to become a classic in our classrooms.

— Dr. Kristi Hovington, Literary Consultant

May, 2024

This book is a genre-bending exploration of digital horror in between the periods of the Arab Spring and COVID, but it is so much more. In academic, but accessible, prose, Moreno details the digital artefacts circulating online in North Africa, particularly in Morocco, including cartoons, memes, music videos, fashion influencers, female digital creators, movies, and urban subcultures and ties all of this together with politics, sexism, power dynamics, global influences, and then situates all of these things within the horror genre frame. It is a riveting, entertaining, and enlightening read and excellently researched and analyzed; I'd not read a scholarly work on digital artefacts before and have not perceived them the same way since.

Not only did I greatly enjoy the book, but my life is all the better for being introduced to Beldi Cool, Moroccan rap, and so much more. Particular favorite chapters include the desirability of monsters/the grotesque; explorations of horror in a post-colonial age; the chapters about sexism and female creators; resurrections of memes as they relate to power struggles, and all things Beldi Cool. 

I think folks who enjoyed "It Came From the Closet" will find much to appreciate here.