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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.
List of contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Note on Translations, Transcriptions, and Transliterations
- Table 1: Transliteration of Arabic Letters
- 1: Introduction
- Part 1: The Poetics of Digital Horror
- 2: The Digital Grotesque
- 3: The Case for (Decolonial Horror)
- Part 2: Stories of the Undead
- 4: Animating the Living Dead
- 5: Policing the Borders of Abnormality
- Part 3: Home Wreckers
- 6: Diaries of a Monstrous Woman
- 7: Dis-Meme-Bering the Nation
- Part 4: Desiring the Grotesque
- 8: Monstrous Speech
- 9: Ghosts of a 'Cool' Past
- 10: Conclusion: The Unbearable Afterlives of Memes
- Bibliography
- Index
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.
Summary
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.
Additional text
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.
