Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque - (British Academy Monographs) by Cristina Moreno-Almeida (Hardcover)

About the Book

Investigating the grotesque aesthetics of a postdigital era, Memes, Monsters, and the Digital Grotesque offers a fresh and innovative approach to examining informal politics, monstrous aesthetics, and digital media.

Book Synopsis

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', Moreno-Almeida 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, characterized by despair, alienation, and anomie, alongside opportunities for creative experimentation made possible in the postdigital era.

Review Quotes

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.

-- "Shakuntala Banaji, Professor of Media Culture and Social Change, London School of Economics and Political Science"

Almeida's book does not simply invite you to explore - it drags you, kicking and screaming, through the dark corridors of the digital/real. For researchers bold enough to face this monstrosity, Almeida offers nothing less than a generous invitation to conceive a monster theory on Moroccan culture and politics. Almeida's exploration of Moroccan society through the lens of monstrosity represents a significant intervention in Cultural Studies within Morocco. Her work enriches the ongoing theoretical and thematic debates we have initiated (Belghazi and El Maaroufs) regarding precarity, monstrosity and abjection. This anthology's expansive scope, much like its monstrosity, is also its greatest asset - inviting a wide audience to be jolted out of their comfortable assumptions about Moroccan culture.-- "Moulay Driss El Maarouf, European Journal of Cultural Studies"

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"

"Almeida's book does not simply invite you to explore - it drags you, kicking and screaming, through the dark corridors of the digital/real. For researchers bold enough to face this monstrosity, Almeida offers nothing less than a generous invitation to conceive a monster theory on Moroccan culture and politics. Almeida's exploration of Moroccan society through the lens of monstrosity represents a significant intervention in Cultural Studies within Morocco. Her work enriches the ongoing theoretical and thematic debates we have initiated (Belghazi and El Maaroufs) regarding precarity, monstrosity and abjection. This anthology's expansive scope, much like its monstrosity, is also its greatest asset - inviting a wide audience to be jolted out of their comfortable assumptions about Moroccan culture." -- Moulay Driss El Maarouf, European Journal of Cultural Studies

About the Author

Dr. Cristina Moreno-Almeida is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Arabic Cultural Studies at Queen Mary University of London and Fellow at the Queen Mary Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She has worked at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London, and the Middle East Centre and the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Her research interests lie at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and cultural production. She has published on rap music, memes, the politics of resistance, nationalism, and online far-right cultures. She is the Principal Investigator of the UKRI (ERC nominated) project 'Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus' (2023-2024) which looks at the melding of historical episodes, nostalgia for lost empires, cultural difference, and violent actions on digital media.