Memes, Monsters and the Digital Grotesque
Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque looks at the emerging and thriving new genre of digital horror from an innovative perspective.
Examining digital cultural production during the period that has been referred to as the 'Arab Winter', the book delves into the memes, animated cartoons, music videos, and expressive cultures like fashion and urban subcultures that emerged between 2016 and 2020.
In revealing concealed narratives underlying the digital lives of artists, as well as ordinary people, Moreno-Almeida explores how memes, horror, and the grotesque capture a moment infused with political and affective significance, characterised by despair, alienation, and anomie, alongside opportunities for creative experimentation made possible in the postdigital era.
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 *
— 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.