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Trendy or transformative? How the global meme elite creates social change in the multilingual internet

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Trendy or transformative? How the global meme elite creates social change in the multilingual internet

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Content i
TRENDY OR TRANSFORMATIVE?
HOW THE GLOBAL MEME ELITE CREATES SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE
MULTILINGUAL INTERNET
by
Sulafa Zidani
———————————————————————————————————————
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)
August 2021
Copyright 2021 Sulafa Zidani
ii
DEDICATION
To my grandfather,
Mohammed (Abu Said) Sindawi.
For putting education above everything.
I hope you know how far it got us.
Rest in peace.

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My curiosity and hard work alone would not have been enough to give this project life.
My first and greatest thanks go to my advisors Henry Jenkins and Josh Kun. Henry, thank you
for always being generous with your support and attention. In every conversation we had, you
listened to me with openness and care and never hesitated to share your own experience. I am
grateful for all the time you have given to reviewing papers, abstracts, proposals, and versions of
this dissertation. Your feedback and ever-so-gentle critique introduced me to new ways of
thinking and shifted my perspective. Mostly, I am grateful to you for showing me by example
how to lead with kindness and that academia need not be a cold, competitive place. This has
given me faith and agency that I know I will rely on for the rest of my career. Josh, in your
mentorship, you challenged me in ways that pushed me to discover my vision and never
compromise on it. You never hesitated to ask me the tough questions that would help me find my
voice and make my work better. In moments of weakness or doubt, you still encouraged me to
achieve my goals. Whether we were discussing academic career-building, music, or food, our
conversations were always a place for me to explore, share, and grow. I am deeply grateful also
to my third committee member, Marwan Kraidy, for believing in me and my work. Marwan, you
not only challenged me and opened my mind to new scholarly worlds, but also asked me to push
back on your challenges. You made me think of myself as a colleague from the onset. This work
was first proposed to my qualifying exam committee members, so I would like to extend my
thanks also to Taj Frazier and François Bar, who served on my qualifying exams committee.
Your insightful feedback and questions have helped shape this project and my thinking.
I am also indebted to my master’s advisor, Limor Shifman. More than anything, I am
grateful to you for seeing potential in me before I identified it myself. During my PhD journey,
iv
you told me “once an advisor, always an advisor” and allowed me to call you up on that multiple
times to ask you questions and benefit from your wisdom.
I am thankful to the USC Graduate School and the USC Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism for providing me with funding in the form of teaching and
research assistantships and being a home for my graduate career. Huge thanks to Sarah
Holterman and Anne Marie Campian, who have been the kindest guides in navigating the
program and the school. Arlene Luck and Larry Gross, who gave me the opportunity to work at
the International Journal of Communication and learn a great deal about the process of academic
journal publishing. And Sangita Shresthova for facilitating a welcoming environment at Civic
Paths with generative conversations and a warm community, even through difficult moments of
loss and grief.
My heartfelt thanks goes to friends and mentors who offered me their time, experience,
and wisdom as I navigated my way through writing, publishing, and job applications: Evelyn
Alsultany, Ben Carrington, Aswin Punathambekar, Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, Reem
Bailony, Niloufar Salehi, Sarah Gualtieri, Cristina Visperas, Omar Al Ghazzi, Sarah Banet-
Weiser, Kate Miltner, Tim Highfield, Neta Kliger-Vilenchik, Samantha Close, Dafna Zur,
William Lafi Youmans, Godwin Jabangwe, Zachary Foster, and Lik Xam Chan—and I am sure
that I am forgetting some folks, but rest assured, I am not forgetting your generosity.
There is a group of friends, some a block away, others across oceans, who have supported
me by listening to me whine and gripe, exchanging ideas, and debating writing, food, art, and
languages. Thank you to Hend Shofany, Areej Mawasi, Bekriah Mawasi, Reema Khrais,
Shagayeg Farahani, Diyaa Ghantus, Michel Jubran, Hannah Weitzer, Sriram Mohan, Shahrazad
Odeh, Suhail Matar, Chao Fang, Kian Behmanesh, Rawan Sheikh Ahmad, Adam HajYahia,
v
Renyi He, Rawan Nuna Cosey, Yossi Buchnik, Anitra Williams, Sobhi Khatib, Noa Oren, Ariel
Tudela, Ross Harris, and Gadi Eimerl. To Silvia Llopis, thank you for your friendship and your
light, and for adding me to the Peen Kweens chat groups, they brought much needed laughs
during stressful times. To Kate Miltner, we will always have Silver Lake Reservoir walks. To
Rachel Moran and Shaun Prestridge, thanks are not enough to express my appreciation for our
pandemic walks, cocktails, and picnics. May we get to repeat those in a healthier world.
I also want to specifically thank my peers in USC Annenberg’s PhD program, including
members of my cohort and my co-working group, the Tree-Growing-ABDs/PhDs: Lauren Sowa,
Briana Ellerbe, Simogne Hudson, Jessica Hatrick, Paulina Lanz, Brooklyne Gipson, Tyler Quick,
Caitlin Dobson, Stefanie Demetriades, TJ Billard, Nathan Walter, Do Own Kim, Courtney Cox,
Matt Bui, Franny Corry, Andrea Alarcon, Soledad Altrudi, Sonia Sheikh, Chris Persaud, Jeeyun
Baik, Ming Curran, and Perry Johnson. Thank you all for being wonderful community members
and supporters for me and my work.
Words cannot communicate how thankful I am to my dearest friends Abeer Abbassi and
Haitham Haddad, for always, always, being there. This project is in many ways a materialization
of our chats in Punny. And, to my partner, Adrian De Leon, thank you for knowing where to take
me to find moments of joy and bringing out the best of me. I am excited for what is to come.
I want to thank the city of Los Angeles for being home and pushing me to take care of
my own well-being and build a network of support to take care of my health through yoga,
zumba, and therapy. I want to especially thank Orameh Bagheri, Agnes Oh, Yume Takeuchi,
Daniel Denton, and Hector Ramirez for being key parts of that network, which was instrumental
for my survival during the PhD program and the COVID-19 pandemic and for my personal
growth.
vi
I am greatly indebted to my family for their love and support. I want to thank my mother
for her boundless generosity and excitement about my work, and my father for being proud of
me and always shipping me olive oil from Palestine. I am also thankful to my aunts Lina and
Khawla for their continuous and unconditional support. And a very special thank you to my
siblings. My eldest sister, Nina Zidani, and brother-in-law Abed Hathot, thank you for
convincing me to come to L.A. and stuffing me with hummus as I build my career. My brother,
Rani Baidoun, your courage and compassion inspire me. Fadila, Kynda, and Dana, you have
added beams of joy into my life. I am so proud of all of you.
Last but not least, a great big thanks to my grandmother, whose curiosity and thirst for
life has taught me youthfulness. Thank you for listening to me, accepting me as I am, and
empowering me to be free.

vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii
Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vii
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ix
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Internet Memes in a Global Context ......................................................................................... 4
Memes are Social ................................................................................................................ 5
Memes are Political ............................................................................................................. 5
Memes are Global ............................................................................................................... 6
Memes are Historical .......................................................................................................... 6
On Language Mixing ................................................................................................................ 7
Questions, Methods, and Analysis ............................................................................................ 9
Chapter Overview ................................................................................................................... 11
References ............................................................................................................................... 13
Chapter One: “America is Everywhere”—Cultural Flows Under Global Capitalism .................. 15
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 15
“Everybody Knows Trump. Everybody Knows SpongeBob”: Cultural Flows and Global
Capitalism ............................................................................................................................... 16
Batman, Robin, and Feminist Arab Men: Media and Global Flows ...................................... 18
Mixing and Cultural Hybridity ............................................................................................... 28
“I Want to Be Authentic to Who I Am”: The Global Meme Elite as Raconteurs of Everyday
Life .......................................................................................................................................... 31
Conversation ..................................................................................................................... 40
An Everyday Life Experience ........................................................................................... 42
A Trending Meme ............................................................................................................. 42
References ............................................................................................................................... 45
Chapter Two: “Speaking in Memes”—The Linguistic and Creative Politics of the Untranslatable
Public ............................................................................................................................................ 48
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 48
Multilinguistic Memes and Translation .................................................................................. 48
Cross-Linguistic Puns ....................................................................................................... 49
Purposeful Mistranslation and Misspelling ...................................................................... 50
Untranslatable Jargon or Language Choice as Communication ....................................... 52
The Global Meme Elite Between Online Publics ................................................................... 55
Opacity and Roaming between Publics: What’s at Stake in the Untranslatable Public ......... 64
References ............................................................................................................................... 70
Chapter Three: Beyond the 24-Hour Instagram Story Memeing and Archiving .......................... 72
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 72
viii
Memes as Digital Cultural Artifacts ....................................................................................... 74
Why are Memes Seen as Transitory? ...................................................................................... 78
Design Characteristics ...................................................................................................... 78
Connection to the Current Moment .................................................................................. 79
Memeing and Archival Practice .............................................................................................. 81
Collecting .......................................................................................................................... 82
Recollecting ...................................................................................................................... 84
Conceding ......................................................................................................................... 89
A New Archive, but Not Necessarily a Liberative One .......................................................... 91
References ............................................................................................................................... 95
Chapter Four: Zanaakha—The Defeated Affect and Sarcastic Humor of Multilinguistic Memes
....................................................................................................................................................... 97
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 97
Affect and Internet Memes ..................................................................................................... 99
From the Outside Memeing In .............................................................................................. 102
Irritating Our Way to the Top? Zanaakha and the Global Meme Elite’s Dual Class Status 104
The Punctures of Irritation: Speaking Truth to … Each Other ............................................. 115
References ............................................................................................................................. 118
Conclusions ................................................................................................................................. 121
References ............................................................................................................................. 132

ix
ABSTRACT
Crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries, multilinguistic memes reflect the dialogue
among cultures under globalization. Thus far, research on memes has addressed countries
separately, neglecting a common genre of memes that are multilingual and multicultural and
missing the power struggles at play in intercultural relationships. This dissertation examines the
role culture-mixing and internet memes play in global cultural flows and power dynamics. It is
based on an analysis of multilinguistic memes, including memes in Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew,
Spanish, French, and English, and interviews with multilinguistic meme makers. Drawing upon
global histories of conflict, colonization, and migration to explore power relations at the
intersection of culture, technology, and politics, it speaks to the expanding field of digital media
studies that presents a complex view of the internet beyond its dichotomous depiction as either
an equalizing or oppressive means of communication.
It finds that multilinguistic meme making and sharing connects a community, the global
meme elite, which has a complex standing when it comes to class, race, and gender in global
cultural power dynamics. The global meme elite enjoys access to the capital afforded by
globalization, including things like international education or travel, but still shares experiences
of those at the bottom of the global caste system, like being vetted at borders and facing
discrimination. In making and sharing multilinguistic memes, the global meme elite centers
around the untranslatable and forms an untranslatable public. This public uses the untranslatable
as a discursive and creative practice to exercise members’ mobility, to roam among disparate
publics, and to participate in the conversations that it deems relevant. To do so, it builds and
borrows from meme libraries and speaks to meme trends by inserting historical and traditional
cultural elements. Thus, it turns memes into digital cultural artifacts that go beyond ephemera
x
and intervenes in the direction of global cultural flows. Although Western (primarily U.S.)
culture still dominates much of the multilinguistic meme content (be it through the presence of
the English language or U.S. popular culture), multilinguistic meme makers partially disrupt that
dominance by not speaking directly to the West or approaching it as a superior culture. Looking
more closely at the sense of humor and affect, what I call the zanaakha, of multilinguistic memes
revealed a cycle of irritation, whereby the global meme elite, irritated by its limited access to the
cultural capital promised by globalization, further produces irritation in its memes. This irritation
works as a call or reach for capital while also providing social, cultural, and political critique.

1
INTRODUCTION
Memes are ubiquitous parts of our everyday communication. New memes are created
every day as a response to or commentary on current events and cultural trends. This dissertation
focuses on what I have come to identify as “multilinguistic memes”—memes containing more
than one language—and explores how they bridge technology, global culture, and everyday life.
Bilingual and multilingual people, who mix languages and move between places and across
cultures, create and circulate memes that use multiple languages to express ideas or situations.
For example, they might be a Spanish speaker going out again despite their mom’s disapproving
comments. Or a Hebrew speaker of Yemeni origin trying to translate Beyoncé into their culture.
Additionally, they might be an Arabic speaker rating their poetic devices to find the politest way
to decline an invitation (see the following figures). The ubiquity of memes in everyday life
makes them a fruitful area to investigate power at the intersection of global politics, digital
culture, and language. Multilinguistic memes are a mixture of genres, visuals, and literary
devices. They bring the art of the remix and mash together puns, parody, languages and
vernacular expressions, and popular culture. This dissertation puts historical and political
relationships among cultures in the spotlight and shows the role that digital communication plays
in these relationships.

2

Mom: Going out again?
Me: [a doll with makeup and accessories giving side-eye]

-I’ve got hot sauce in my bag. Swag.
-I’ve got s’hoog [Yemeni hot sauce] in my bag. Damn [using Yemeni-Israeli slang].

3

-Maybe
-Hopefully
-Inshallah [God willing]

The ubiquity of memes in everyday interactions makes them an important component of
participatory culture, a different experience of consumption wherein people are not viewed as
passive consumers but as active producers with the ability to transform meanings and disrupt
power dynamics (Jenkins, 1992, 2006). Participatory culture is characterized by ease of access to
cultural production and circulation, allowing opportunities for people to create, share, and spread
content. This involvement opens “civic pathways” (Jenkins & Shresthova, 2016, p. 257) that
might enable participants to see themselves as civic agents.
The concept of participatory culture is foundational for understanding the framework
within which memes are created, circulated, and shared and for understanding participants’ role
in reinforcing or disrupting the power dynamics in which they live. Participants’ interactivity
with popular culture allows them to express their collective identity and critiques of the world
around them. Therefore, civic and political participation are understood here as extending
beyond the institutional realm. Henry Jenkins and Sangita Shresthova describe a shift from
4
thinking of politics in terms of special events (elections, protests, etc.) to thinking of them as
integrated in people’s social and cultural lives (Jenkins & Shresthova, 2016). As countless
scholars working in fields as varied as political science and cultural studies (to name a few:
Dahlgren, 2013; Jenkins & Shresthova, 2016; Mouffe, 2005) have long argued, politics and
culture are not disconnected from each other; they are often found on the same social networking
platforms and messaging apps and in the circulating digital media content itself.
Internet Memes in a Global Context
Scholarly work on internet memes often traces the field back to memetics (the study of
the transmission of information and culture) and Richard Dawkins’s (2006) use of the term
meme, which he coined to describe how culture is transmitted in a way that is analogous to
genes. In his own words: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from
body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping
from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins,
2006, p. 192). Dawkins’s thought has inspired an array of scholarship that uses biological
analogies to understand culture either by likening memes to viruses and genes or by linking them
to concepts in evolutionary biology. These analogies are rightfully criticized for viewing people
as passive hosts rather than active decision makers in the transmission process (Jenkins et al.,
2009) and for reducing the complexity of culture to make it fit within the biological concepts
(Shifman, 2014).
Dawkins’s (2006) approach pushes for a universal standard by which we could evaluate
the success of a meme. The risk in this approach is that it could easily lead a discussion on
culture to a dichotomy that focuses on dividing ideas into successes and failures, good and bad,
rather than a generative discussion on the content of the ideas and the contexts in which they
5
start and spread. It is also determinist in a way that sees memes as spreading on their own will
and does not attribute any power to the individuals taking an active part in the process of
dissemination. In this way, it is fundamentally opposed to the approach of participatory culture.
Limor Shifman encourages researchers to approach internet memes as cultural building
blocks as a way to uncover the meanings and structures people build around them (Shifman,
2014). She defines Internet memes as: “(a) a group of digital items sharing common
characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each
other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users”
(Shifman, 2014, p. 41). Building on Shifman’s and other scholars’ conceptualization of internet
memes, there are four aspects I would like to highlight:
Memes are Social
Memes are usually edited and shared in an online community (Mina, 2019). They are
used to negotiate and maintain a shared collective identity (Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2017). Kate
Miltner (2014) examined the circulation of LOLCats meme and shows how memes are used to
connect people with one another. “What I ultimately discovered,” she writes, “is how seemingly
trivial pieces of media — pictures of cats with captions — can act as meaningful conduits for
intricate social relations” (Conclusion, para. 1).
Memes are Political
According to Shifman (2014), memes serve as bridges between the personal and the
political. An Xiao Mina (2019) argues that memes are used in battles over narratives of social
change online and offline. Memes are used in social movements and protests, institutional
political events like elections, and national or international crises such as the COVID-19
pandemic.
6
Memes are Global
Meme culture flows transnationally. The same memes and meme templates are used
across different cultures and languages, sometimes in contradictory ways, like the example of
Pepe the Frog, co-opted by the alt-right movement in the United States and used in
prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong. Memes also are global in that they are a manifestation of
certain aspects of globalization. For example, the dominance of the United States in global
politics is one of the reasons why memes about former U.S. President Donald Trump are found
in different countries and languages (Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2020).
Memes are Historical
Internet memes comment on a contemporary social or political issue by evoking a
historical moment (Hristova, 2013). Gayle Wald (2009) explains that historical knowledge is
made and remade through memes. Wald uses the example of the meme “A queer Black woman
invented rock-and-roll” in reference to Sister Rosetta Tharpe to unpack how creating and
circulating memes acts as a radical politics of remembering that connects memory and memes to
larger struggles against the erasure of Black bodies from history. Thus, memes can act as bridges
connecting the past and the present and are not outside the context of history.
Building on these theorizations of memes, I propose a critical transnational approach to
study memes. Examining memes critically and transnationally looks at these four aspects
simultaneously rather than separating them. A critical transnational approach to researching
digital culture looks at: (a) the global political dynamics in which digital culture is imbricated;
(b) the public discourse that it speaks to and publics that it constitutes; (c) how digital culture
participated in historical and archival conversations and practices; and (d) the personal and
affective dimensions of digital culture. This approach produces a complex view of the power
7
dynamics around digital culture like internet memes. It also sees digital culture as an extension of
“offline” culture rather than seeing the internet as a separate space. The way that digital culture
items like memes are created and circulated is deeply connected to our social ties and our
cultural and political experience in everyday life.
On Language Mixing
Several historical, social, political, and technical conditions are at work behind the
language choices people make. Historical and current colonial relationships grant certain
languages an advantageous status over others. English is perhaps the most dominant example,
which used to be referred to as the lingua franca of the internet (Crystal, 2018). Research shows,
however, that English does not always dominate in multilingual situations (Danet & Herring,
2007). According to Brenda Danet and Susan Herring (2007), multilingual people can be part of
multiple online speech communities that reflect their “offline” speech communities. Although
English sometimes dominates as a lingua franca in global forums in which participants speak
different languages, a different lingua franca exists in other situations, such as German in the
case of migrants in Germany (Androutsopoulos, 2007). Moreover, sometimes no lingua franca
dominates, as is the case in some diasporic community forums like Russian Jewish Israelis
(Fialkova, 2005). In other situations, participants use code switching in a similar way to how
they switch between languages or mix languages in face-to-face interactions (Danet & Herring,
2007). It is imperative, then, to get a broader understanding of how languages interact with one
another on a global level (with or without English).
Community belonging can also determine language choices. Danet and Herring (2007)
see internet users as members of speech communities, and although language boundaries do not
always intersect with geographical boundaries, the two can influence people’s experience online.
8
Diasporic or immigrant communities must navigate the dynamics between home language and
host language. Language choice is also determined by the community or the conversation in
which a participant seeks to take part, whether it is a local conversation, a global conversation, a
subcultural conversation, etc. In writing about Latin American cities, Canclini (1995) notes that
the pluralism in languages that is found in private interactions is lost in public conversations (in
mass media), which tend to stick to officially recognized languages, leaving Indigenous
languages aside. Warschauer (2000) suggests that a similar dynamic takes place online, whereby
participants use English in certain forums but choose alternate languages or dialects in other
online domains. In the American context, this practice, Warschauer argues, acts to resist the
monolingualism and cultural homogeneity in America.
In addition, the history of the technology itself plays a role in language choice. The
encoding system used for electronic communication, American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (known as ASCII) was established in the 1960s based on the Roman alphabet and
English language. Speakers of languages with non-Roman writing systems have been especially
disadvantaged by this history (Danet & Herring, 2007). Not only does this pose a technical issue
of not having the ability to use one’s own writing system, but it may also have cultural
consequences about the status associated with English versus languages that are othered through
the history of electronic encoding systems.
The shortcomings of the encoding systems have been one of the reasons for creative
solutions by internet users. One prominent example relevant for this project is Arabizi
(alternatively known as the Arabic chat alphabet), a nonsystematic transliteration of Arabic into a
combination of Roman letters and Arabic numerals. For example, the phrase al-salam alaykum
would be spelled with a 3 (3alaykum), symbolizing the pharyngeal consonant ain.
9
When it comes specifically to language mixing, there are also a variety of reasons why
people mix languages. Mixing offers a way for people to express the hybridity in their own life
experience and identity. But other than this social affordance, there is also a “technical”
advantage to mixing languages, which is the ability to choose the best words for expressing
specific meanings. But mixing languages, I argue, can also be a playful way to raise critical
questions about social conditions, cultural traditions, and political relationships.
If we consider that mixing languages is in part a result of the repercussions of a history of
colonialism, displacement, or immigration, it becomes ever more important to understand the
role that digital culture plays in this dynamic. By focusing on language mixing rather than
conducting a comparative study on separate languages, this project puts these historical and
political relationships in the spotlight. In other words, this project helps answer questions about
the power of digital communication and how it is implicated in people’s place in the world.
Questions, Methods, and Analysis
I examine multilinguistic memes to consider how the social, political, and global aspects
of internet memes collide. Multilinguistic memes are manifestations of participatory culture and
civic engagement in global cultural flows. Crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries,
multilinguistic memes reflect the dialogue among cultures under globalization. Thus far, research
on memes has addressed countries separately, neglecting a common genre of memes that are
multilingual and multicultural and missing the power struggles at play in intercultural
relationships. Multilinguistic memes are an underresearched yet generative area. Researching
them reveals certain power dynamics that monolinguistic memes might miss, such as the
interactions and contact among cultures. Focusing on multilinguistic memes also serves to better
understand the community of people who make and consume them, people who mix languages
10
in their everyday lives. In this way, multilinguistic memes are a fruitful area to research culture
and politics amid digital globalization.
To guide this work, I ask: How do multilinguistic memes bring community together?
What type of publics do they create? What is the role of language crossing in these publics?
What values and ideologies are promoted or criticized in multilinguistic memes? What cultural
change, if any, do multilinguistic memes espouse? What role do multilinguistic memes play in
broader politics of globalization and cultural flows?
To answer these questions, I collected and analyzed 223 multilinguistic memes, including
memes in Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and English. In addition, I conducted
interviews with eight multilinguistic meme creators. The participants were recruited through a
strategic sampling technique that focused on people who create and post multilinguistic memes
on social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. The interviews were
semistructured and ranged from 25 minutes to 1 hour in length. They were conducted via phone
or video calls, except for one interview that was conducted anonymously through Twitter direct
messages, following the interviewees’ preference. The interview questions focused on the
creative process of making memes, the decision to mix languages and cultures, and the
relationship between memes and everyday life. Following each participant’s preference, many of
the interviews were also conducted in mixed languages. Following the interviews, I transcribed
and translated the data. I translated all quotes presented in this study. Some of the names of
interviewees were changed or anonymized. This decision was based on each participant’s
preference.
Just as memes are convergences of visuals, texts, literature, and popular culture, so does
the analysis in this study draw on a number of fields, including internet studies, hybridity theory,
11
postcolonialism, and critical theory. My dissertation moves away from the methodological
straitjacket of national identity by focusing on language mixing, aiming to examine power
relationally. I draw on global histories of conflict, colonization, and migration to explore power
relations at the intersection of culture, technology, and politics. This approach is more in line
with participatory culture because it sees individuals as active creators, interpreters, copiers, or
manipulators of meaning who have a complex relationship with the context around them rather
than “hosts” that may get “infected” with content and pass it on unconsciously. Whereas
memetics seems to focus on evaluating memes and their reach, understanding memes requires
unpacking the context surrounding them and the entanglements of historical relationships
(especially Euro-American colonial and neocolonial history emphasized in the work of Taussig,
1992) in today’s intercultural relationships and mixes.
Chapter Overview
Memes are a way for people to reflect on their daily life experiences and intervene in
cultural politics by creating and circulating ideas, values, and ideologies that they seek to
promote or criticize. In the following chapters, I outline how mixing languages is a way to limit
this activity to a narrow public with a complicated class status whereby multilinguistic memes
serve as a way to create both a safe and elitist space with a specific type of humor and affect. In
each chapter, I interrogate multilinguistic memes at a different level (global, public, historical or
archival, personal).
In Chapter One, I illustrate how, in the framework of global capitalism and against the
backdrop of colonial history, there exists a “global meme elite,” a class of people considered to
be middle or upper-class in terms of access to the networked culture celebrated by globalization,
yet who still share experiences of those at the bottom of the global caste system, like being vetted
12
at borders and facing discrimination.
In Chapter Two, I explain how members of this global meme elite use the point of
convergence between languages and cultures to create an “untranslatable public,” wherein they
negotiate politics and cultural values. Untranslatability, I argue, serves as a boundary that
establishes who is included and excluded in this public (and when). Rather than basing its social
status on fluency in Western culture and catering to it, the global meme elite uses memes to
comment on and question cultural hierarchies.
Chapter Three frames memes as digital cultural artifacts and demonstrates how internet
memes are neither transitory nor born in a vacuum. Rather, creating memes is a practice of
archiving; meme makers build on past memes and cultural objects, making and circulating
memes to catalogue their own voices in the archive. Therein lies their potential intervention in
global power dynamics.
In Chapter Four, I interrogate the relationship between affect and humor. Although
multilinguistic memes deliver sharp cultural and political criticism, the structure of feeling they
communicate is self-aware, extraneous, and defeated. I connect this structure of feeling to an
irritation produced by the dual status of the global meme elite and suggest the term zanaakha to
capture the irritated affect and kitschy humor expressed in multilinguistic memes.

13
References
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Canclini, N. G. (1995). Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity.
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Crystal, D. (2018). The language revolution. John Wiley & Sons.
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15
CHAPTER ONE: “AMERICA IS EVERYWHERE”—CULTURAL FLOWS UNDER
GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Introduction
It’s like you’re in the desert in the middle of Afghanistan, which America destroyed, and
then you see an ad for Coca Cola. Although Europe has done a lot, in the past 50 to 100
years, all the culture is American. Music is American, cinema is American, theater is
American, everything. America is the cultural capital of the world today, not Europe. We
have an illusion that it’s Europe, but it is not. Europe is done. America is a big part of our
culture, no matter what we do. All the technology, all the movies, all the music we listen
to in public spaces, whether we want to or not, is American. And I think memes are the
same, in most of the world—they’re American. We can’t ignore it. You have to be going
around with your eyes closed to not understand American culture. … America is
everywhere. You can’t escape it. This is our culture.
–Bshara, Palestinian meme maker
This chapter discusses global cultural flows. It addresses questions like: How are global
cultural flows determined? What flows globally? And what is the role of multilinguistic memes
in global cultural flows? I borrow the term “raconteurs of everyday life” (Hall, 2018, p. 74)—a
term Stuart Hall used in reference to Creole speakers—to situate the global meme elite of
multilinguistic meme makers and their use of memes in the context of global capitalism. This
chapter draws on data from multilinguistic memes and interviews with meme makers. I unpack
the tension in the flow of culture in the digital age whereby on one hand, American culture
strongly dominates the directions and contents of cultural flows and on the other hand,
multilinguistic meme makers paradoxically use these contents to create memes that insert their
own voices and experiences into these flows. This tension is expressed in the interview quote
from Bshara, a 35-year-old multilinguistic meme maker who refers to American culture both as
an inescapable dominating global force and as “our culture.”
In this chapter, I analyze memes in their global context, understanding text and context as
mutually constitutive (Appadurai, 1996; Kraidy, 2002). The context—as in the specific
16
historical, social, and political relations—in which a text like a meme is produced, consumed,
and circulated is essential for understanding memes. I follow Kraidy’s (2002) understanding of
context as not only the environment in which texts are created and circulated but also the forces
at play in these processes. Sociohistorical context is seen as crucial for understanding meaning
(Jenkins et al., 2003; Stratton & Ang, 1996; West, 1990). By looking at particular texts in their
conditions, we can gain a more qualitative understanding of the relations in which they exist.
Culture cannot be understood in a vacuum; texts operate in the frameworks in which they are
produced, circulated, and consumed (Jenkins et al., 2003). Thus, to understand the meaning of
multilinguistic memes, we must look at the frameworks and relations of global power in which
they operate.
“Everybody Knows Trump. Everybody Knows SpongeBob”: Cultural Flows and Global
Capitalism
Globalization, as indicated by its derivational affix, is a process. Scholars emphasize
different characteristics of globalization: the movement of people and culture (Canclini, 2014),
deterritorialization of culture (Appadurai, 1996), and networking culture at a never-before-seen
scale (Castells, 2004; Jameson, 1999). What these scholars agree on is that globalization is a
process of continuous reorganization of the interconnected realms of economics, culture, and
politics and that this process is fundamentally asymmetrical (Appadurai, 1996; Canclini, 2014;
Castells, 2004; Jameson, 1999).
The movement of people, ideas, money, technology, and media are some of the main
characteristics of globalization (Appadurai, 1996). Néstor García Canclini (2014) defines
globalization as the structural process of cultural diffusion. Due to the difficulty of explaining
globalization, he calls globalization an “unidentified cultural object” (p. 73), which he defines as
17
a process of an ever-changing nature that is understood and experienced differently by different
people. These different understandings of globalization are not only due to its continuously
shifting nature, but also due to the imbalance in the distribution of its effects, which Canclini
(2014) labels the “dual agenda of globalization” (p. 152): the unification of worldwide financial
systems on the one hand, and the unequal or unjust redistribution of wealth and resources on the
other.
Frederic Jameson (1999) sees globalization as a communication concept that masks
economic and cultural dimensions. Although contact and economic exchange between cultures
or nations is not a new phenomenon, new media technology has been instrumental to creating
flexible production that has expanded the capitalist order into an interdependent global network
of extraordinary scale. There is an inherent contradiction in globalization as an opportunity for
contact and borrowing between cultures without one acting as the dominant center and
globalization as unification and standardization (or Americanization). Indeed, both articulations
of globalization exist simultaneously. We see cultural exchanges manifest through, for example,
fandom of Korean soap operas and K-pop music across the Middle East (Malik, 2019; Otmazgin
& Lyan, 2014) and Japanese anime fandom in Mexico City (Pino, 2018). However, the power
dynamics on which globalization is founded have led to a “fundamental dissymmetry in the
relationship between the United States and every other country in the world, not only third-world
countries, but even Japan and those of Western Europe” (Jameson, 1999, p. 58). The dominance
of the United States results, according to Jameson, in the destruction of other people’s national
cultural industries, including an inequality in the languages of the world, with a special status
held by English language. “English itself is not exactly a culture language: it is the lingua franca
of money and power, which you have to learn and use for practical but scarcely for aesthetic
18
purposes” (Jameson, 1999, p. 59). Even the emphasis on multiculturalism and diversity is driven
by market expansion as opposed to truer attempts at a polyvocal, pluralistic global society
(Canclini, 2014).
Jameson’s conceptualization of globalization echoes through Bshara’s quote. Bshara uses
expressions like “no matter what we do” and “whether we like it or not” and describes fluency in
American culture as “inescapable”: “You have to be going around with your eyes closed to not
understand American culture.” When I asked why he thinks memes that mix cultures are popular
he said, “Everybody knows Trump. Everybody knows SpongeBob,” illustrating how the spread
of American culture, be it in the news media or in cultural production, also plays a dominant role
in determining the content of meme culture.
Batman, Robin, and Feminist Arab Men: Media and Global Flows
I owe my good English to watching The Bold and the Beautiful in fourth grade. What
fourth grader knows the term “shared custody” in English?
–Sharihan
Media—including television, film, music, and new media cultural production—have been
reorganized by the process of globalization in a manner such that a small number of companies
diffuse content across the planet (Canclini, 2014). Although important regional cultural
exchanges exist (for example, across Arab countries), as do Global South exchanges (such as the
spread of K-pop or Turkish soap operas across many countries), content from the United States
(like Hollywood) and U.S. companies (like Facebook or Twitter) dominates these global cultural
flows. Jameson (1999) calls this dissymmetry of globalization a cultural intervention “deeper
than anything known in earlier forms of colonization or imperialism, or simple tourism” (p. 58).
The dominance of the United States in global cultural flows has meant that trends in
American media cultural production are delivered across the world. The “It Was Just Too
19
Funny” meme with Ellen DeGeneres and the “Drake” meme (see following figures) both show
that global cultural diffusion includes television, film, music, and internet culture. If a song,
television show, or meme is trending across the United States, it is likely to reach other regions
and cultures across the world as well. The dominance of the United States is so far reaching that
even when we see what could be categorized as a South-by-South cultural mixing, like the one
exemplified in the Chinese “Despacito” meme, what emerges from the Global South is also
determined by measures of success in the American industry. “Despacito” is a song originally
released in January 2017 by Puerto Rican singer Luis Fonsi and Puerto Rican rapper Daddy
Yankee, with a remix released in April 2017 featuring Canadian singer Justin Bieber. Despite
being territorially part of the United States, whether Puerto Rican cultural production reaches a
dominant status in global cultural flows is determined by the U.S.-centric globalized market
standards. After the release of the remix with Justin Bieber, the song became a global hit and
generated several remakes in Chinese, which may have been instrumental in it becoming a part
of Chinese meme culture, as seen in the following example.

“Why did the snake go to sleep? Because it is a snake.”
20
[A play on the near-homophony of “snake” and “tired” in Arabic: thu’aban and ta’aban,
respectively]

- I knew Drake from “In My Feelings”
- I knew Drake from this meme

Dad: Son, from now on, do not smoke
Son: Why, what’s up?
Dad: Dad is just worried you may be smoking too much
[pronounced diē shì pà xī duō, which sounds like Despacito]
-Both recite Despacito lyrics

The tension inherent to global cultural flows is expressed in meme culture. Although
American culture strongly dominates in terms of content, multilinguistic meme makers
paradoxically use this content to create memes that insert their own voices and experiences.
21
Thus, in the memes cited here, we see familiar characters or lyrics from the United States or
U.S.-centric global culture, but we also see meme makers using them to share their own
interpretations, jokes, or experiences. In Bshara’s case, this tension meant that one of the first
memes he made drew on a trending meme wherein DC Comics character Batman is slapping his
junior counterpart, Robin, for repeating words or deeds that may be considered stupid or
annoying. Bshara made this meme for a Facebook page he founded titled Feminist Arab Men,
which has since been passed to someone else. Using Batman and Robin for his feminist activist
purposes, Bshara demonstrated the tension in global cultural flows, whereby inserting one’s own
voice employs dominant culture rather than avoiding it.

Robin: Sometimes I help my wife with house chores.
Batman: She’s seriously so lucky to have you!
-Your partner works just as much as you do and gets just as tired as you do! From now on,
housework is to be split 50%-50%!

The dominance of American culture extends beyond cultural references that are
22
commonly known across the globe. Along with these cultural references circulate values and
logics that can be harmful. One example of this is the military-industrial complex and its
attached racialized power dynamics. Weapons are a mass export of the United States and one of
its main sources of profit (Jameson, 1999). The global flow of the military industrial complex
also includes border patrol and policing culture. In his book Empire of Borders, journalist Todd
Miller (2019) outlines the expansion of the U.S. border apparatus across the world in an effort he
describes as “gargantuan” (p. 16). Miller explains that through setting up border patrol stations
and trainings in different countries, the United States is effectively expanding not only its
borders but also its logics of borders and border policing. Thus, what echoes behind the words
from my interview with Bshara that “America is everywhere” goes beyond music, film, and
television. In fact, there is a risk that some of the music, film, and television that dominates
globally can bring with it undesired values. According to Miller (2019), U.S. dominance creates
a “global caste system” (p. 165) that is founded on the U.S. border apparatus and promotes a
specific social order wherein transnational elites are considered admissible and the rest of the
world is either inadmissible or requires extreme vetting at the border.

23
-Thug Life

-You’re too cool, you have a big influence on others, I must arrest you
-Special SWAT unit

The racial dynamics of the global caste system set up by the United States extend to the
realm of new media technology and are reflected in meme culture as well. Existing research has
demonstrated how the design and infrastructure of the internet reinforce preexisting systemic
racism (Brock, 2012; Daniels, 2013; Nakamura, 2008; Noble, 2018). Search engines and
algorithmically driven decision-making reproduce sexist, racist, and stereotypical depictions of
marginalized groups (Noble, 2018). User interfaces on different platforms condition and regulate
the way that internet users are classified, framed, and linked on the internet (Nakamura, 2008).
At the same time, although the internet carries on the “offline” power dynamics, the
medium’s interactivity allows potential for negotiation (Nakamura, 2008). Internet users use
social media platforms to engage in discussions surrounding racial dynamics (Brock, 2012;
24
Daniels, 2013). Racial ideologies and racial formations, thus, are both shaped and contested
within digital media (Frazier & Zhang, 2014).
Even in academic inquiry, researching race on the internet has been left mostly to
researchers who are people of color, and their studies have been marked as outside the central
theoretical concerns of the field (Daniels, 2013). A similar issue happens with researching the
internet critically from a transnational perspective. This has left the field of internet studies part
of a similar dynamic as the internet itself, wherein it is U.S. centric and anything outside of the
United States remains at the margins. What I aim to accomplish here is to push for centering
cases that are not necessarily U.S. centric and critically examine the role of the United States in
deciding what the internet looks like and what culture looks like globally.
Multilinguistic memes demonstrate that the social hierarchy imposed by globalization
and even the language of policing also seep into meme culture. Although these examples did not
dominate the multilinguistic meme culture examined in this dissertation, it is an important
phenomenon to consider. For example, the meme with the “special SWAT unit” demonstrates
how the exact language used in American policing (and thus, also in cultural production) is
adopted in meme cultures outside the United States. The “Thug Life” meme cites a term that has
been used in a derogatory way to refer to refer to Black people in urban communities in the
United States and as part of the war on drugs and criminalization of Black people (Jeffries,
2011). The term spread along with its reclamation, especially by hip-hop music artists, which led
to its spread into internet culture as well. The way the phrase is used in meme culture often
conflates the meaning of the word thug with the word gangster, as is the case in the Chinese
meme shown previously. These two words used in hip-hop lyrics refer to two different meanings.
Thug is usually used in Black street vernacular and hip-hop vernacular to refer to someone who
25
developed a way to cope with the social, political, and economic hardships faced by Black urban
communities due to racist policies in the United States (Anderson, 2020; Jeffries, 2011).
Gangster, a term first popularized through the 1930s Hollywood gangster film genre, depicts a
person who is in opposition to the way that society works (Shadoian, 2003). This Hollywood
archetype of gangster has seeped into 1990s Black-made films and hip-hop culture’s use of the
term gangsta, creating a tension between the oppositional aspects of their portrayal versus their
association with capitalist excess and hegemonic aspirations (Munby, 2007). The Hollywood
film portrayals of the gangster often reinforce a stereotypical misogynist image of urban Black
life in the United States (Denzin, 2001). The appropriation and conflation of these two terms in
multilinguistic meme culture illustrates the extension of the culture and language of U.S.
policing and criminalization of Black citizens beyond the physical borders of the United States,
not only through the military-industrial complex itself but also through Hollywood film and
meme culture.

-When grandma finds out you got a tattoo

A global social hierarchy based on racism also expresses itself in memes that use “digital
26
Blackface” (Jackson, 2017), where Black bodies are commodified by non-Black people to
express and entertain themselves. This phenomenon has been previously labeled as “platformed
racism” (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017), referring to how social networking platforms can
reproduce racism. The meme shown here, “When Grandma Finds Out You Got a Tattoo,”
demonstrates how racialized groups are often grouped together in popular culture. In this meme,
the character portrayed is labeled as abuela, Spanish for grandmother. However, the image is of
Madea, a Black woman portrayed by American actor and director Tyler Perry based on his
mother. Madea is a character who appears in several of Perry’s films, portraying a tough mother
figure whose care for her family is expressed through her direct communication and boldness.
This meme draws on Madea’s unhesitating willingness to take daring or even aggressive
measures to protect her family as a way to express the reaction a Latina grandmother might have
to her grandchild getting a tattoo. In doing so, this meme presents a paradox whereby on one
hand, it identifies shared sentiments in the experience of being the child of a Black mother and
the grandchild of a Latina immigrant to the United States, yet on the other hand, it could be
argued that it employs digital Blackface to express this shared experience.
Another meme with a similar paradox is shown next; it cites the Mandarin word for that,
which is pronounced nà ge or nèi ge depending on the dialect of the speaker, the latter sounding
similar to the English racial slur known as the n-word. The narrator (“Me”) of this meme sets
themself apart from the mother, cited here as speaking her heritage language and being unaware
of racial dynamics and offensive words. The narrator, on the other hand, is portrayed as better
versed both in the English language and in the cultural dynamics surrounding what not to say. It
can be argued that this meme portrays an affinity with Black people because it shows
disapproval of the use of offensive language and expresses a desire to use language that is
27
respectful. However, the narrator uses digital Blackface by employing an image of a young
Black boy to portray themself and deliver their message.

-My mom, standing next to a Black person: “That, that, that—what’s it called …”
-Me: [staring awkwardly]

This work is premised on an understanding that meme makers have agency in their
choices. Yet it is also important to acknowledge that content that is dominant in cultural flows
has more power to spread further and influence individual choices. This is precisely the reason
why we see the same dynamics of racism that exist in American culture often reproduced in
global meme culture, including culture that attempts to question or critique these dynamics. It is
also the reason why meme templates and cultural production from the United States has come to
be labeled by many of the meme makers I interviewed as a common language that allows them
to engage with meme culture globally. Chapter Three of this dissertation includes a deeper
exploration of how multilinguistic memes engage in critiquing global power dynamics.
28
Mixing and Cultural Hybridity
Although the logic of global capitalism remains consistent throughout much of
multilinguistic meme culture, the intervention of these meme makers is to insert their own voices
and interpretations into global cultural flows. According to Appadurai (1996), new media
technology offers new resources for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds.
The imagined world depicted in the multilinguistic memes presented in this chapter does not
necessarily push against the dominant Western conception of the world. It complicates it by
inserting images of people often underrepresented in global flows.
It may seem unusual to see the initials “ATM” in reference to a middle-aged woman
wearing a headscarf with her hand in her bra. This meme, captioned “the first ATM known to
humans in history,” cites the practice of women carrying money in their bras. It draws a
connection between this practice associated with an older time and the automated teller machine
linked to modernity.

-The first ATM known to humans in history

29

-All buy
-Oboi

It may also seem unusual to see the label “all buy” on an image of a film character
depicting a Manchu military commander. The caption is a near-homophone of 17th century
Manchu military commander Oboi’s name. This image is part of a trend of memes created
around the November 11 Chinese Singles’ Day holiday (also called Double 11), known as the
largest shopping day in the world.
Memes participate in global cultural flows, both reflecting the existing dynamics and
simultaneously intervening in them. They are a way for meme makers to interpret and make
sense of the world around them while also disrupting the aspects of it they find unfavorable. The
two examples cited her (“ATM” and “All Buy”) demonstrate how multilinguistic memes can act
as a continuation of globalization’s Western-centric logics. Based on his criticism of Western
social science’s conception of modernity as a singular moment that created the divide between
the past and present, Appadurai (1996) might critique the conception of the ATM as a symbol of
modernity that stands in opposition to carrying money in a bra. Indeed, there are many reasons
why someone would carry money in their bra in a modern globalized capitalist society. This
practice has, for example, been recommended on tourism blogs and travel insurance company
30
sites for travelers. Similarly, the humor in the “All Buy” meme is centered on the contradiction
between the historical and modern, as mirrored in what is broadly considered part of Chinese
culture in opposition to the English language. In this way, multilinguistic memes, then, reflect a
similar break between tradition and modernity, as conceived by Western social science.
However, while doing so, they also localize or add their own take on this phenomenon.
The idea that memes that mix languages and cultures can both reflect and intervene in
power dynamics builds on a history of scholarship around borderland theory, culture mixing, and
hybridity. Borders have become simultaneously more and less relevant under globalization
(Canclini, 2014). One of the paradoxes of globalization is that simultaneous to the expansion of
borders described here, globalization also has boundary-defying tendencies. Culture and
technology seem to flow in a boundaryless environment (Appadurai, 1996). The boundary-
defying aspect of globalization has complicated the relationship between homogenization and
heterogenization of cultural production because it provides more opportunities for individuals to
pursue various cultural paths, yet these cultural paths can become the same across global cultural
flows (Cowen, 2009). Cross-cultural trade, according to Cowen (2009), “makes countries or
societies ‘commonly diverse,’ as opposed to making them different from each other” (p. 129).
This is the logic of the market, the logic of global capitalism. It explains why we see iPhones in
palms across the globe and why many internet users default to the same social networking
platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) across the world. Yet multilinguistic memes draw a
more complex picture whereby within that sameness and in relationship to the dominant cultures
that circulate across the globe, culture mixing and hybridity are being used to insert unique
voices and mark their uniqueness.
Remixing has been used to engage with spatial politics in the age of asymmetrical
31
economic globalization and question modern social institutions and hegemonic structures
(Sinnreich, 2010). Although when speaking about new technology in this chapter, I usually refer
to the internet, it is imperative to mention that remixing preceded the internet. One example of an
older “new technology” that introduced mashups and remixes between cultures is the invention
of the crossfader, the tool used by DJs for mixing music by fading one track over another (Kun,
2015). When it comes to the internet specifically, remixes and mashups can be a way to practice
identity (Lyan et al., 2015) and politics (Elsayed & Zidani, 2020) and interfere in global cultural
flows (Zidani, 2020).
Although multilinguistic memes reflect and reinforce existing characteristics of global
cultural flows, they are also a space to critique and imagine alternatives. Globalization’s
boundary-defying tendencies affect the production of reality (Appadurai, 1996) and can create
room for potentially limitless imaginings (Canclini, 2014). Such imaginings open space to
disrupt and criticize the existing logic of cultural flows through cultural production like art
(Canclini, 2014) and I would argue, memes. In my interview with Aseel, she affirmed the
importance of the imagination by saying: “Globalization ignores my specific oppressive context.
The fictional world that makes us feel equal is the place where we can make change.” Thus, new
imaginaries are political and should be taken seriously.
“I Want to Be Authentic to Who I Am”: The Global Meme Elite as Raconteurs of
Everyday Life
To better understand multilinguistic meme culture, it is important to situate the group of
people participating in creating and circulating these memes in the dynamics of globalization.
This group, which I call the global meme elite, is a class of people who may be considered
middle or upper-class in terms of their access to the networked culture celebrated by
32
globalization, yet who still share experiences of those at the bottom of the global caste system.
They are close to the transnational elite in some ways, or more accurately, the transnational
middle class. They have the economic ability to cross state borders (i.e., ability to afford travel or
study abroad), and the cultural literacy to cross figurative borders (mixing languages and content
from different cultures). Importantly, although I refer to the global meme elite here as one group,
it is in fact not a single entity with conditional or restrictive membership or any organizational
structure. I group the global meme elite here for theoretical purposes to think in a
noncomparative way about what people across the world who make and circulate multilinguistic
memes have in common and what their creation and circulation of memes does culturally. The
global meme elite, then, is an umbrella term that combines disparate groups of multilinguistic
people with inner nuances. It includes, for example, people who are multilingual by necessity,
force, or choice. Those who are multilingual by necessity may be acquiring other languages to
survive and manage their everyday life necessities like working in a second language. They may
live in a society categorized by diglossia. Others may be learning a second or third language due
to living under a regime that demands it, such as a colonial system in which one language
dominates. This is why we might see memes made by Palestinians in Israel that mix Hebrew
with Arabic.

-Please allow me to say this but [in Arabic]
33
-You’re not OK [meaning what you did was not OK or not cool; in Hebrew]

Yet others acquire multiple languages as a form of excess, learning them as a hobby or
out of personal interest. This is exemplified in memes made by English speakers studying
Mandarin, learning how to add 儿 (er) to the end of their words to sound more like a Beijing
native. There are other ways that people become multilinguistic, the details of which are beyond
the scope of this chapter. However, I name these examples first, to emphasize the diversity in
this category that I have come to call the global meme elite and second, to introduce the race and
class politics involved in multilingualism.

-When you speak Chinese after a week in Beijing.
-Er, er, er, er, er …

Moreover, the global meme elite is a dynamic group that is continually moving and
growing. As global politics shift, multilingualism, meme trends, humor, and cultural trends all
change, and the global meme elite changes along with them. It might include more or fewer
people, languages, or content from different cultural industries. This dissertation, then, theorizes
34
the global meme elite but also captures it in a very specific moment in time. Incorporating this
understanding of the global meme elite’s changing nature at this early stage of its theorization
gives us a foundation for better understanding the global meme elite and global cultural trends
more broadly.
Shifman (2016) explains that creating user-generated content is usually work accessible
to “digital elites.” Although owning a smartphone and a laptop, tools people can use to create
content, is no longer as big of a barrier as it used to be, having the time to engage deeply with
internet and popular culture through both consumption and production are at least middle-class
markers. Notably, the interviews I conducted with meme makers show that the global meme elite
is not merely digital. The meme makers interviewed all had at least one higher education degree.
They had multiple experiences of travel, studying abroad, or transnational family ties. Their
multicultural and multilinguistic literacy is a key status marker that characterizes them as
distinct.
In my previous work on digital remix and mashup culture in the Arab world, I explain
that creators also define themselves through their consumption of their linguistic, local, regional,
foreign, and global culture (Zidani, 2020). A Lebanese person, for example, consumes Lebanese
media in Arabic and perhaps also in French, Egyptian film or music such as the classical Arabic
music of Umm Kulthum, the United States’s Hollywood industry, and possibly media from
India’s Bollywood industry, Japanese animé, Korea’s K-pop music or soap operas, and others.
Meme makers also expect the same multicultural fluency of their followers. In the memes cited
in this chapter, for example, viewers are required to know Ellen DeGeneres while also
understanding Arabic–English cross-linguistic puns. They are required to recognize Drake and
the meme template that is trending with his image. Similarly, multilinguistic meme consumers
35
who primarily speak Mandarin are expected to speak English as well to know the song
“Despacito” and to be familiar enough with hip-hop and meme culture to recognize the term thug
life. When I asked Sharihan, an Arab meme maker, about the followers of her meme page, she
explained that the page is not mainstream: “If I used Arabic only, it might have more likes and
followers and become more mainstream, but I don’t really want it to be.” She explained her
audience is “you know, like us, people who go out and do stuff, not people who are [culturally]
conservative.” In my interview with Sha3banu, he also said he could get more followers if he
made content in one language. But he does not want to avoid mixing languages. “I want to be
authentic to who I am,” he said. Thus, meme makers use characteristics to define themselves and
their followers, and mixing languages and cultures is connected to meme makers’ own identity.
Yet while enjoying the privilege of economic and cultural accessibility to crossing
borders, the global meme elite still goes through the experiences of those at the bottom of the
global caste system: being subject to extreme vetting, being refused entry, and facing systemic
and cultural discrimination on grounds of race, ethnicity, or gender, among others. In this way,
multilinguistic meme creators experience firsthand what Canclini (2014) called the “dual agenda
of globalization” (p. 152) as they enjoy access to the networked culture celebrated by
globalization while also experiencing the cultural impacts of the asymmetrical nature of global
capitalism.
The multilinguistic memes that they create illustrate this dual experience and the mixed
class status in which they are situated, making them raconteurs of everyday life under global
capitalism. I base this term on Stuart Hall, who in his discussion on creole dubs it a “double
language” and its speakers “established raconteurs of daily life” (Hall, 2018, p. 74). Double
language refers to the double encoding whereby:
36
the subordinate classes mimicked the modes of expression of their masters and played out
the required performance of obedience, while simultaneously they mimed, caricatured,
and appropriated dominant ways of speech, dress, and behaviour, adapting them to their
own purposes and meaning in order to free themselves—if only fleetingly—from the
daily imprint of subjugation. (Hall, 2018, p. 74)
Hall goes on to describe how through creative and humorous hybridized modes of
expression, speakers of Jamaican creole capture “the emotional inflections, humour and nuance
of local life. As a consequence Jamaicans prove themselves accomplished raconteurs of
everyday life” (p. 75).
I use this phrase to connect multilinguistic meme makers to the historical, social, and
political conditions in which their memes are born, in addition to the daily life settings in which
the memes are created. Multilinguistic memes specifically make an interesting case to examine
ordinary culture at the point of contact or collision with global cultural dynamics. My
interviewees made statements like, “This is how my sister and I talk to each other every day”;
“We make things that we would enjoy. Honestly, I feel like being honest to who we are is the
best way to go about this”; and “This is just how I am.” They explained that memes are created
in everyday settings that involve conversation, gathering with friends over drinks or coffee, and
exchanging messages or jokes. Memes circulate not only on public platforms but also often in
private online settings such as messaging groups of close friends. In this way, memes are what
Raymond Williams (2001) labeled as “ordinary.” As raconteurs of everyday life under global
capitalism, they tell the complex stories of the global meme elite, some of which I hope to
successfully convey through this dissertation.

37

-You have time to write a long [Facebook] status on Game of Thrones, but you don’t have
time to love me.

-You have time for a spontaneous trip to Sinai, but you don’t have time to love me.

38

-You have time to do an ER shift, but you don’t have time to love me.

-You have time to open a PayPal account, but you don’t have time to love me.

39

-You have time to watch the ad before the video on YouTube, but you don’t have time to love
me.

The memes shown here are part of a series on the Facebook page The Best of Sharihan
LTD ( رو ا ﺋ ﻊ ﺷﺮ ﯾ ﮭ ﺎ ن LTD). Sharihan identifies as an Arab woman in her 30s from the city of Haifa,
Israel. The memes she posts on her page are usually co-created with her best friend. In my
interview with her, Sharihan explained that this series was born out of conversations with her
best friend about dating. When asked about the creative process and word choices, Sharihan
answered, “That’s just how we talk.” She said almost all the memes on her site are created
through a similar process. “I’ll be sitting somewhere with my best friend at a bar or somewhere
talking about stuff like an ex or whatever, and suddenly, OK! We come up with a catchy
sentence, and we go off!”
The setting in which memes are created was similar across all of my interviewees, in that
it was always an ordinary everyday setting: Bshara is at home with his wife and child; Hager
collaborates with her sister; the admin of the page LGBT Sarcasm Society is in his room after
midnight watching movies or interacting with people on social media, and so on. Their creative
process was also similar. Almost all of them stated it involved at least two of the following
features.
40
Conversation
Everyday conversation plays a central role in creating memes. My interviewees stated
that their memes are born out of conversations with friends or family. These conversations can
either spark ideas spontaneously, as Sharihan is quoted explaining, or they might be specifically
targeting a meme idea that they have in mind. Hager said: “My sister is more hooked into
internet culture than I am. So, she comes up with an idea, then comes to me to help her find the
shortest possible way to put it into a meme.” LGBT Sarcasm Society’s admin mentioned that
other meme makers send him memes to ask if he thinks they are funny. When I asked Bshara
about his target audience, he immediately said “Aseel,” another meme maker I interviewed who
he admires. Other than conversations between friends and meme makers, conversations are also
a central category of memes. Many memes cite a conversation or a response and reaction in a
conversation. The two following examples show a whole conversation and a reaction or
response. In the first one, an image of American singer Post Malone is used to represent the term
in the Mexican dialect of Spanish for “kind of bad.” The second example is taken from Bshara’s
meme series about weddings, a topic that he mentioned makes him feel a little angry and about
which he has a lot to say. In this meme, Bshara uses a scene from the animated Pixar superhero
film The Incredibles to explain his reaction to the repeated ritual dances in which wedding guests
must participate.

41

-Hey, how are you feeling?
-[Image of American singer Post Malone]
-What’s that?
-Kind of bad [a near-homophone of Post Malone]

-That moment in the wedding when you just sat down after a dance welcoming the bride and
groom and the band calls all the guys to the dance floor.
-I can’t. Not again.
-I’m not … strong enough.
42

An Everyday Life Experience
One of the main ways in which memes are created is through everyday life experiences
that meme makers want to share because they make them angry, they make them laugh, or they
think others will be able to relate. Bshara, for example, said, “I have a whole lot to say about
weddings, so I went and found the right meme templates. I had a few ideas and found the memes
that suit them.” LGBT Sarcasm Society’s admin drew a distinction between an “old school” of
memes and a “new school” of memes. The older, he explained, are a cheesier form of humor,
whereas new school memes start with an idea or a message and then the maker finds the meme
template that fits. For him, this involves creating activist messages using cultural production to
critique homophobia in culture, religion, and politics.
A Trending Meme
Rather than start with an idea, meme makers sometimes begin with a meme trend they
want to join. Examples of this cited in this chapter include the Ellen meme, the Drake meme, and
the Batman and Robin meme, among others. Sharihan said she and her friend create memes to
intentionally insert their daily life experiences into meme culture “Sometimes I see a meme and I
would like to see a version that reflects my experiences.” This sentiment was echoed by
Sha3banu, who said, “If I see a meme trending on Twitter, I want to make my own version of it.”

43
.
A Chinese remake of the movie poster for the film La La Land citing the practice of street
dance parties in rural areas

A Lebanese remake of the movie poster for the film La La Land parodying politician Samir
Geagea’s tendency to repeat words

Creating memes out of conversations with friends at home or in their favorite coffeeshops
or bars becomes a way for members of the global meme elite to interpret, reflect on, and
reimagine their complex position in a globalized world. They create memes that demonstrate
their fluency in the dominant American culture but also insert their own experiences into global
44
cultural flows where they do not find representation. Whether it is taking globally trending meme
templates like “That Moment When” and applying it to their unique experiences or remaking a
Hollywood movie poster into something they see in their culture, the memes they make connect
them to their friends, family, and community of fans while also situating their everyday
experiences within the framework of global power.
The tension that multilinguistic memes illustrate in the role of digital culture in global
cultural flows is demonstrated in the paradoxical use of multilinguistic memes, which can
simultaneously reinforce dominant cultural flows while also disrupting them by inserting the
meme makers’ experiences and imaginings. This tension is reflected in their perception, as
Sha3banu put it, that their authentic self is found in language mixing and that American culture,
as Bshara put it, is both an inescapable dominating global force and “our culture.” Rather than
pushing to resolve this tension or “pick a side,” this chapter shows how tension can be
informative as it teaches us about the dual status of the global meme elite and the paradoxes of
cultural flows under globalization.

45
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CHAPTER TWO: “SPEAKING IN MEMES”—THE LINGUISTIC AND CREATIVE
POLITICS OF THE UNTRANSLATABLE PUBLIC
Introduction
In this chapter, I explain three types of relationships that multilinguistic memes have to
translation: cross-linguistic puns, purposeful mistranslation, and untranslatable jargon.
Connecting Emily Apter’s (2013) work on the Untranslatable to scholarship on publics and new
media technology (boyd & Marwick, 2017; Marwick & boyd, 2014; Squires, 2002; Warner,
2002), I unpack the power of untranslatability in memes, arguing that moving between languages
and between content that is translatable and untranslatable are ways for the global meme elite to
maneuver its way across conversations with publics of different sizes and characteristics.
This chapter analyzes multilinguistic memes at the level of groups or publics. Building on
boyd and Marwick (2017), I understand the term public here to mean both the space where the
discourse takes place and the community that emerges as a result of discourse practices. This
chapters draws on data from interviews with meme makers, especially questions about their
target audience and the thought process behind decisions on the elements they choose for making
their memes. I also draw on multilinguistic meme content to illustrate through examples what
different types of relationships to translation look like and how meme makers’ creative decisions
can facilitate speaking to the publics of their choosing. I propose the term “untranslatable
publics” to unpack the discursive practices of the global meme elite and the conversations in
which it participates.
Multilinguistic Memes and Translation
Multilinguistic memes have three relationships to translation: cross-linguistic puns,
purposeful mistranslation, and untranslatable jargon.
49
Cross-Linguistic Puns
Cross-linguistic puns are one way in which multilinguistic meme makers draw on the
point of connection between cultures. Puns rely on the similarity of sounds and emphasize the
connections between cultures that are traditionally seen as separate or even opposite to each
other. I’ve written previously about how these cross-linguistic puns can challenge the defined
boundaries of a culture and the view of culture as binary oppositions of each other (Zidani,
2020). When it comes to translation, cross-linguistic puns are inherently resistant to direct
translation and always require additional contextual explanation. This resistance to translation is
illustrated in memes such as the “Avatar” meme or the “Invincible East” meme. Memes that are
built on puns resist translation not only by relying on homophony as part of their message, but
also carrying popular culture context that can be missed if translated.

-Should I Avatar myself or will you be having breakfast with me?
[Avatar is homophonous to أﻓ ﻄ ﺮ aftar, which means to have breakfast or break the fast, often
referring to the meal eaten after a day of fasting in Ramadan]

50

The Invincible East 东方不败 (Dōngfāng Búbài) is a fictional character from the martial arts
novel The Smiling, Proud Wanderer by Jinyong. Several film and television characters were
written based on Dongfang Bubai, including the film The East Is Red (also known as
Swordsman III). This meme draws on Dongfang Bubai’s name and formidable martial arts
skills to create a pun about shopping relating to November 11 (Singles’ Day), an unofficial
holiday in China usually celebrated with big sales and shopping.

Purposeful Mistranslation and Misspelling
Similar to a type of musical parody labeled misheard lyrics, multilinguistic memes often
purposefully mistranslate or misspell words for the sake of humor. The aim of mistranslation or
misspelling is to make a cross-linguistic joke or to relate the content to a specific accent or
dialect of a language. Mandarin Chinese expressions, especially four-character structured phrases
and proverbs (such as 成语 chéngyǔ), are a particularly common target for purposeful
mistranslation and misspelling in multilinguistic memes. No zuo no die is a Chinglish expression
of this kind that became a viral meme in 2014 and was included in the Urban Dictionary, a
primarily English language and U.S.-focused source. No zuo no die builds on the four-character
structure and mistranslation of the phrase 不作不死 (bùzuò bùsǐ), which is literally translated as
“no do no die,” meaning if you do not cause trouble, you will not get into trouble (often said in
retrospect: If you got into trouble, then you must have done something to ask for it). As this
example illustrates, mistranslation in memes in Mandarin often follows the same rhythm of the
original expressions. This makes such memes catchier and more spreadable.

51

Three examples of the “No Zuo No Die” meme trend

Another example of purposeful mistranslation is the “Did You Magic” meme, which
plays on the similar sound of the word sihr, magic, and suhoor, the dawn meal eaten before the
beginning of a day of fasting during the month of Ramadan. The mistranslation in the meme acts
as the basis for humor.

52

-Did you magic?
-Huh?
-Did you eat suhoor?
[Suhoor ﺳﺤ ﻮ ر is the name of the pre-fast meal eaten before dawn during the month of
Ramadan. It sounds similar to the word for magic, sihr.]

Untranslatable Jargon or Language Choice as Communication
Many memes employ jargon in one language without translation. For example, the words
“crush,” “Christmas market,” or “mashallah” appear in memes in Arabic mixed with English
without translation. Although such terms are not impossible to translate, I suggest that the
language choice itself communicates something that would be lost if it were translated. The
linguistic choices in this jargon reflect the linguistic landscapes in which meme makers
encounter the represented concepts in their daily lives and the cultures or subcultures with which
they choose to communicate. Because English is inescapable in the internet user experience,
many terms that denote specific phenomena or actions related to internet culture and meme
53
culture are expressed in English (e.g., “fake news,” “playlist,” “tag,” “share”). For Palestinians
who live in Israel, Hebrew is a dominant language in the academic and professional realms. That
is why terms like “chemical engineering” or an “on-call shift in the ER” appear in Hebrew.
Another example are terms related to Muslim culture such as “inshallah,” “masjid,” or
“jahannam.” Although these terms can be translated directly into English as “God willing,”
“mosque,” and “hell,” respectively, meme makers choose the terms as they would use them in
their lived experience. These linguistic choices demonstrate the language landscapes in which a
meme maker wants to engage and the audience they are targeting in their communication. The
global meme elite keep some jargon untranslated as a way of specifying that audience. The
interviews I conducted with multilinguistic meme makers show that they are not necessarily
seeking a broad audience, but rather they want to keep these memes within the age group of
youth and the global meme elite community.

-The chance that this is not “fake news”
-A probability of one point comma two percent

What stands out about these three types of relationships of multilinguistic memes and
translation is that in none of them does translation take place. In fact, the final products (the
memes) are resistant to translation due to their language mixing and layered meanings. Whereas
54
translation usually aims to convert a text from one language to the next without leaving a trace of
the difference, multilinguistic memes mix languages and combine cultures, posing a tension to
the process of translation or even rendering a text untranslatable. In this way, multilinguistic
memes foreground cultural difference and communicate through it. Translation hints at the
possibility of a neutral state of “nonbelonging” a “nationalism degree zero,” as noted by Apter
(2013, p. 36). The untranslatable, however, resists that assumption and emphasizes the failure of
translation at capturing deeper meaning around connotation. In a book on the politics of
untranslatability, Emily Apter (2013) discusses the untranslatable regarding global and linguistic
power relations:
The Untranslatable emerges as something on the order of “an Incredible,” an
“Untouchable” (L’Incorruptible in French). There is a quality of militant semiotic
intransigence attached to the Untranslatable, making it more than just a garden-variety
keyword. Often it can come off as non-sense that becomes strangely accessible through
the sheer force grammar. … This effect of the non-carry-over (of meaning) that carries
over nonetheless (on the back of grammar), or that transmits at a half-crocked semantic
angle, endows the Untranslatable with a distinct symptomology. Words that assign new
meanings to old terms, neologisms, names for ideas that are continually re-translated or
mistranslated, translations that are obviously incommensurate (as in the use of esprit for
“mind” or Geist), these are among the most salient symptoms of the Untranslatable. (pp.
34–35)
Cross-linguistic puns, purposeful mistranslation, and untranslatable jargon are deliberate
choices that meme makers consciously make. In discussing the process of making memes,
Sharihan said, “The words we write are exactly the words we say. We don’t edit, rephrase, or
translate our sentences, we just put them as is in a meme.” These choices communicate
information like the connection of language to history, the relationship between words, or the
connotation attached to a term. In multilinguistic memes, untranslatability transforms power
relations in two ways: first, in its emphasis on and celebration of cultural difference. Although
meme accounts exist that are built on the practice of translating memes (for example, from
English into Arabic), such meme accounts inadvertently endorse the idea of cultural equivalence
55
and nationally or ethnically branded differences. Multilinguistic memes, on the other hand, use
the untranslatable to highlight the complexity of cultural difference (and similarity) and maintain
the link between certain terms and their historical and contextual connotations. Second,
untranslatability in memes can also be seen as remedial in that through mixing languages and
resisting translation, it effectively excludes certain audiences from understanding the content or
participating in the discussion. For groups of people who have been historically excluded or
marginalized from the public sphere or those who are at more risk when participating openly in
online discourse, centering the untranslatable can be a communication act that serves as a
recuperation of sorts of the loss of power that they experienced. In the words of one of my
interviewees, Aseel: “Our everyday context that we live in is oppressive, as opposed to the
fictional context [of memes and popular culture].” Aseel then invoked the Declaration of the
Independence of Cyberspace, in which John Perry Barlow speaks of the internet as a space where
nation-states have no authority and cannot impose their rules (Barlow, 1996). “It just makes me
think: Is the fictional space the place where we can make change?” Thus, the global meme elite
uses the untranslatable in multilinguistic memes as a way to rearrange cultural difference in a
way that suits its members.
The Global Meme Elite Between Online Publics
Multilinguistic meme makers make deliberate choices that center the untranslatable and
move away from translation, monolingualism, and what Apter described as the translation
assumption, or the assumption of cultural equivalence. Meme makers I interviewed expressed
that they had been thinking about translation and monolingualism in memes, and that they
mostly step away from them. They felt that multilingualism was more authentic, whereas
monolingual memes were more mainstream. Bshara brought up a specific meme account on
56
Instagram called Illegal Memes, which he described as an account that posts direct Arabic
translations of popular memes in English. According to Bshara, the humor of this meme account
is “lame” ( ﺑﺎﯾ ﺦ ) and translation makes it seem forced, which is what makes it less funny. Hager,
another meme maker I interviewed, said that mixing languages is “true to who we are.”
Sha3banu said that making memes that mix languages and cultures has allowed him to make
like-minded friends in other countries. Making connections through memes was reiterated by
Bshara, who said his main target audience is Aseel, another multilinguistic meme maker. Aseel
herself said that making multilinguistic memes is a way for her to participate in a conversation
around topics that she cares about.
Moreover, the content of the memes also serves as a space for negotiating translation and
untranslation. In a series of memes where a young woman has a conversation with a sheikh, the
untranslatable is at the forefront of the discussion. The young woman and the sheikh represent
different age groups, genders, religious obedience, and dedication to popular culture fandom.
The sheikh represents the view that certain terms (like Jahannam, Sahaba, and words of prayer
or Duaa) are sacred and thus, using their popular culture equivalent (like “lit,” “squad,” or
incorporating popular music lyrics) would break that sanctity. This is in line with previous
research on youths’ creative online content in Egypt that illustrates that youth use humor to break
the sanctity of figures of authority, particularly the older generation and cultural traditionalists
(Elsayed, 2016; Elsayed & Zidani, 2020). In this case, the untranslatable is used to break the
sanctity and create a space where concepts related to religion and popular culture can coexist in a
point of convergence where their similarities and differences are celebrated.

57

-Fatima, I know you’re American, but you can’t say “It’s lit” when describing hell.

-Khadeja, I know you’re American, but you can’t refer to Al-Sahaba as squad.
[Al-Sahaba اﻟ ﺼ ﺤ ﺎ ﺑ ﺔ are the disciples of the prophet Mohammed, literally the Companions of
the Prophet. Squad, meaning group of friends or team, is a term often heard in hip-hop lyrics
that became a trend in the popular culture lexicon in 2016–2019.]

58

-Jamilah, I know you’re a true Belieber, but you can’t begin your prayer with “Is it too late
now to say sorry?”
[The term Belieber is a reference to fans of Canadian pop singer Justin Bieber. “Is it too late
now to say sorry are lyrics from Bieber’s 2019 song titled “Sorry.”]

One of foundational analogies that came up regarding untranslatable memes is viewing
memes as a language. I resisted this metaphor previously, thinking that it does not account for
the different ways in which the same symbols can be used in different contexts. However,
several of my interviewees brought up this notion that memes are a language. They spoke of
processes akin to language acquisition. Aseel said: “With some memes, it takes me a while to
understand how they work. I can get them and laugh at them, but it takes me a while to figure out
how to make my own version.” Sharihan explained this process with some examples, saying:
I remember when 9gag was at its peak and people started speaking in memes. They’re
short and simple, and you can understand their meaning so quickly. They’re so witty, and
I really enjoyed that wittiness. I remember the penguin meme with penguins going in
different directions to denote that one thing is good and one thing is bad, or Bad Luck
Brian, which made it clear that something unfortunate happened. So, there were some
characters and images that made it very clear what the meme was saying. In this way, a
language was formed for people to speak in. Today, if you want to talk about some big
subject, it can be enough to just say one sentence from a meme. And I feel like the
memes I consume and the memes I make are basically the same language. It’s like I
learned a language that I’m now participating in creating. For example, if I’m sitting with
some friends and one of them is being difficult, I can say “OK, Karen!” And everyone
knows who Karen is, it’s that woman with the short-angled haircut who keeps saying she
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wants to speak to the manager. This has become part of the way we speak.

From left to right: Awkward Awesome Penguin meme, Bad Luck Brian meme, and Karen
meme

The metaphor of memes as language is useful not only for understanding how symbols
are created, acquired, and used with a common meaning, but also for understanding the group
aspects of these communication processes. In Chapter One, I mentioned that interviewees said
that they make memes seeking to speak to one another. Aseel said, “Good memes can capture a
lot without using many words. A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. So, if there’s a
hot topic—like, right now it’s the elections—I can express things that way. When I make memes,
my goal is to be part of the discussion.” Thus, meme makers use a language common to the
group with which they want to be in conversation.
In choosing the untranslatable as an organizing element and their main discursive style,
the global meme elite composes a public, which I propose calling the untranslatable public.
Catherine Squires (2002) defines a public as “a set of physical or mediated spaces where people
can gather and share information, debate opinions, and tease out their political interests and
social needs with other participants” (p. 448). Michael Warner (2002) distinguishes between the
public and a public, the former being “a kind of social totality” (p. 49), whereas the latter is a
60
concrete audience or a group of people that “knows itself by knowing where and when it is
assembled in common visibility and common action” (p. 50). boyd and Marwick (2017) combine
these two definitions as they define networked publics as “(1) the space constructed through
network technologies and (2) the imagined community that emerges as a result of the intersection
of people technology and practice” (p. 7). A public, then, is simultaneously the space where the
discourse takes place and the community that emerges as a result of discourse practices. The
untranslatable public emerges out of the discourse practices of the global meme elite and the
spaces in which they take place. These spaces are not limited to the online realm. In fact,
interviewees mentioned “speaking in memes” in person as well; at a bar, a café, or wherever they
might be spending time with friends who speak the same meme language.
Publics are formed through discursive practices and organized around texts (Warner,
2002). Thus, belonging to the untranslatable public is continually produced and reproduced by
creating intercontextual and multilinguistic memes. In other words, as Warner (2002) notes,
belonging to a public does not require that members know one another, nor does it depend on
their personal identity or physical copresence—rather, it relies on participation and a shared
understanding of the world (Livingstone, 2005). Publics, in fact, serve a social role for their
members to make sense of the world around them and their relationship to society (boyd &
Marwick, 2017). The meme makers I interviewed come from different backgrounds but had one
thing in common: the experience of being “in between.” Some defined themselves as
immigrants, diaspora members, or “third culture kids” navigating two or more cultures. For
others, the experience of being in between had more to do with their status as part of the global
meme elite, which I elaborate on in Chapter One. This is an experience related to not being part
of “the mainstream,” as Sharihan put it. The experience of being in between is acted out in the
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way that the untranslatable public operates, as explored here.
Notably, the untranslatable public is not always untranslatable. It is, rather, organized
around untranslatability, meaning that it is characterized by its members’ ability to move in and
out of the untranslatable depending on their needs and on the publics to which they choose to be
visible. Sharihan described a rare type of meme series she and her collaborator made for their
meme page during Eid El Fitr. “We made a series of memes that say ‘It ain’t Eid unless…’ and
that attracted a lot of people, so it was a more mainstream meme series. People like that will
connect more to content about Eid or family-related issues than content about exes or one-night
stands.” This example demonstrates how the discursive practices of the untranslatable public
become boundary-making practices that decide who is or is not part of the conversation.
By marking themselves off from the dominant public, the untranslatable public can be
considered a counterpublic. Counterpublics are defined as “parallel discursive arenas where
members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate
oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs” (Fraser, 1990, p. 67), and
they are by definition in conflictual relation to the dominant public (Warner, 2002). Drawing on
Fraser’s work, Squires (2002) divides counterpublics into three different types: enclave,
counterpublic, and satellite public. Taking into account existing political, economic, social, and
cultural conditions, a marginalized group can have different responses. An enclave public holds
debates internally and hides counterhegemonic ideas and strategies to remain safe; a
counterpublic tests its ideas by interacting with the dominant public; and a satellite public, which
separates itself from other publics for reasons not related to oppressive relations, involves itself
occasionally with these other publics.
Squires’s model for distinguishing between subaltern counterpublics is generative for
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thinking about how the untranslatable public moves between different levels of closeness to the
dominant public. The way that the untranslatable public operates has characteristics from all
three categories. Most of the time, it is a combination of an enclave and satellite public.
According to Squires, the satellite public is usually made up of a privileged class that wants to
maintain a sense of superiority. This relates to the global meme elite’s class status and the
privileges they enjoy, especially their access to higher education and multicultural experiences.
As one interviewee put it, “I don’t mean to patronizing, but people in this group have to be
intellectuals and culturally and politically aware and know current events. They’re more
experienced. They need to be critical thinkers, they need to be witty, and they have to also be
aware of meme culture.” At the same time, the lack of safety that they experience due to their
dual status pushes them to search for a debate space that is private and safe from intimidation, an
enclave public. What differentiates an enclave public from a satellite public, according to
Squires’s model, is that whereas enclave publics provide a safe space for marginalized people to
negotiate, innovate, and strategize how and when to interact with dominant publics, satellite
publics deliberately separate from and rarely interact with dominant publics. This can explain
why many untranslatable meme makers choose to keep their social media accounts private or do
not seek a wider audience. A few interviewees mentioned that they post most of their memes as
Instagram stories, posts that disappear after 24 hours.
When the untranslatable public wants to move from being an enclave to being a
counterpublic—in other words, when they want to communicate with dominant publics—the
language choice also changes from centering around the untranslatable and multilingualism to
monolingual or translated texts. For example, if Bshara wanted to communicate his criticism of
wedding practices to a more dominant audience of Arabic speakers spanning multiple
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generations, he might reconsider using The Incredibles movie as a reference and using a
multilinguistic joke as the central humor device. In fact, Bshara could have also made the meme
using The Incredibles movie and limiting it to English only to create a critique of Arabic
wedding habits that is accessible to a wider public of English speakers. The way the meme looks
now is accessible only the global meme elite, meaning that the message of critique remains
within the untranslatable public.

-That moment in the wedding when you just sat down after a dance welcoming the bride and
groom and the band calls all the guys to the dance floor.
-I can’t. Not again.
-I’m not … strong enough.

Maneuvering the affordances of translation, culture, and social media platforms, the
untranslatable public this enjoys a relative freedom to move between enclave and counterpublic.
This might act as remedial for their agency in arranging cultural differences and participating in
the conversations of their choice. In the following, I explore the tension that exists in these
conversations being simultaneously public and opaque.
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Opacity and Roaming between Publics: What’s at Stake in the Untranslatable Public
Social media privacy operates in a public-by-default manner (boyd & Marwick, 2017).
This brings users to navigate privacy in their own way, combining settings in the architecture of
each social media platform and their own strategies and tactics (boyd & Marwick, 2017;
Marwick & boyd, 2014). Alice Marwick and danah boyd (2014) propose understanding privacy
as a networked concept, focusing on the relationships between people and the interactional
dynamics in active privacy practices. The way in which the untranslatable public achieves
privacy is through centering the untranslatable: mixing languages and using popular culture
symbols known to the target audience, including meme culture as well as TV and film cultural
production.
The untranslatable public operates in a space that is not only limited to the global meme
elite’s audience. Rather, its members post memes on social media networks like Instagram,
Facebook, and Twitter, home to other publics that they may be a part of in some way, albeit not
at all times. These include publics like their families, popular culture fandom groups, publics
concerned with specific political or societal issues (such as the environment or a political party
of choice), institutional groups like a university or workplace, etc. The coexistence of disparate
audiences and social contexts online is labeled as “context collapse” (Marwick and boyd, 2014,
p. 1056). Context collapse, coupled with the fast-changing privacy settings in the architecture of
social media, has brought users to abandon technical features of privacy and focus instead on
encoding the content itself with linguistic and social cues as a way of gaining control of privacy
by limiting the audience. They build on their knowledge of the public they want in order to
communicate in a specific social context (Marwick and boyd, 2014).
The multilinguistic meme makers I interviewed expressed that they can decide which
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public they are communicating with based on their linguistic and creative choices. Whether they
decide to create a meme that is monolinguistic or multilinguistic, use images that are well known
or more niche or subcultural, or use images from popular culture known to the people around
them or ones that connect them to another culture are all choices that have implications for the
overall reach and their cultural group, political leanings, gender, ideology, and class. In Chapter
One, I cite quotes from interviews in which meme makers explained that their choice of creating
multilinguistic content limits the number of their followers or the people who engage with their
content. This choice is tied to meme makers’ sense of authenticity and their desire to be outside
of what they consider to be mainstream culture.
More specifically, the public in which multilinguistic meme makers want to participate
has certain characteristics: (a) a public sphere in which meme makers can speak to one another
and exchange ideas; (b) a public of people who even if they are not meme makers, also identify
with the same class that I label the global meme elite; and (c) a public in which they feel safe to
break sanctity, challenge authority, question social norms, promote the values they agree with,
and enjoy the cultural production that they like (from different cultures) without criticism or
backlash.
How the untranslatable limits access fits in the framework of what James Scott (1990)
labels a “hidden transcript.” Scott differentiates between public transcripts, where open
interaction between dominating and nondominant publics takes place, and hidden transcripts, the
discourse produced for a nondominant audience that takes place “beyond the direct observation
of powerholders” (p. 5). Even when they are available publicly, the meanings behind hidden
transcripts are not accessible to the dominating class and thus, they remain hidden despite being
available or visible. In the case of multilinguistic memes, they are often posted on social media
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accounts that are public (i.e., not limited to a certain group or audience, accounts that anyone
could follow). It is their untranslatable nature that limits their accessibility; that is, the language
mixing and choices related to popular culture.
The dynamics of the dual-class status of the global meme elite seep into the ways in
which the untranslatable public separates itself from the dominant publics. On one hand, the
untranslatable public seeks a safe space to talk about politics and cultural values that may be
unwelcome, less acceptable, or even life threatening to discuss out in the open. Simultaneously,
its members also want to separate from the dominant public for reasons related to maintaining an
upper-class status. They do not want to be part of what is considered mainstream; they express
that they are not trying to be in conversation with those who might be less educated or less
connected as they are to popular culture and meme trends. In this way, the tension explored in
relation to their dual class status carries over to the safe space created by the untranslatable
public. It is a safe space to discuss cultural values and fight for justice, but it is simultaneously a
classist space and not necessarily a space where everyone is welcome. This exclusivity serves the
goal of protecting members of the global meme elite, who may be at physical risk if involved in
the wider public, but it may have limitations when it comes to making tangible societal change or
welcoming curious members who do not (yet) have the required knowledge. This limitation is
not a necessarily caveat, but rather it is the product of the global meme elite’s double-class
belonging. It shows that a group that has experienced marginalization for generations and to a
certain extent, continues to experience oppression even while experiencing privilege will
prioritize having a closed-off exclusive safe space and might not have hope for creating change
through direct contact with the dominating publics.
Unfortunately, participation in public discourse is not always so accessible or vibrant.
Not every group or individual enjoys the same access to public spaces, media resources,
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or other tools to participate in discursive activities. Particular groups may be targeted by
government officials for censorship and have a harder time distributing their ideas.
Furthermore, prevailing social norms may instill fear in citizens of marginalized publics
that their ideas would at best be met with indifference, and at worst violence. Thus the
ideal of an open public sphere is difficult to realize for oppressed groups. (Squires, 2002,
p. 449)
When the untranslatable public moves from enclave to counterpublic, there is always a
risk tied to increasing its visibility. The dominant public may undermine its messages or
monopolize the opportunities for its own benefit (Squires, 2002), or the member of the public
who makes a post might face online attacks or even physical risk. There is a surveillance
assumption in online communication that comes due to context collapse (parents, teachers, and
disparate publics having access to the content) and the vagueness of structural privacy settings
and data sharing by social media companies (Marwick & boyd, 2014). This surveillance
assumption makes hidden transcripts increasingly important for the global meme elite, which is
navigating not only context collapse but also risks related to government surveillance. For some
members of the global meme elite, surveillance is a real risk. The nature of this risk depends on
the individual’s race, ethnicity, gender identity, country of residence, and nationality, among
other factors. Nation-states have different laws regarding freedom of speech, punishments for
criticism of the ruling class, and defense (or lack thereof) of social activists.
Although untranslatability can be seen as a way to avoid censorship, in fact it does not
provide complete privacy or protection. As Marwick and boyd (2014) put it, “The privacy
practices and strategies that teenagers engage in do not necessarily ‘solve’ the problem of
privacy, but they do reveal how the technical affordances of networked publics are insufficient to
protect privacy” (p. 1064). The content is still visible for social media networks, their
participants, and the governments in the nation-states in which they operate. Thus, the risk for
individuals who make memes about politically sensitive issues remains. In fact, the same social,
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cultural, and political means of control over freedom of speech can intersect and work together
online and offline. One interviewee, whose identity shall remain anonymous, said they steer
away from political content to avoid such risks. “I don’t have politics on my page on purpose. I
don’t mix between social media and politics. I never will. I work with governmental institutions,
so I don’t want to mix that stuff up and talk about these things publicly. I worry about my job. I
don’t want to put that at risk.”
For LGBT Sarcasm Society’s admin, the backlash from individuals was not a big
problem, because they knew how to navigate that, but their freedom of speech was being policed
and limited by both the Egyptian government and Facebook as a platform. On September 11,
2020, the page admin posted a screenshot on the Facebook page that showed that the platform
restricted its limits due to “violation of community standards” (no specific violation was stated).
The admin’s post attached to that image stated:
February 4th, 2019 marked the beginning of LGBT Sarcasm Society and it appears that
the end is near… Facebook, the breeding ground for hatred, homophobia, bullying, and
death-threats, is warning me that this page is on the verge of being shut down because it
is a threat to community values. This is thanks to the online jihad brigades and their
organized reporting campaigns against the page. Thank you to all of my 44 thousand
followers 🏳🌈♥ and until they decide to shut down the page, I will not give up. I will be
here with you. Even if they do shut down the page, I will open another one, and I will
open another one, and I will never let the rainbow flag out of my hands… Follow the
page’s Instagram and Twitter accounts to stay up to date
🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈🏳🌈
The content on LBGTQ Sarcasm Society’s page addresses gender issues at the
intersection of religion, politics, and culture. In my interview with the admin, they said they aim
to make a point through memes “to point out the good and the bad, to go beyond humor in
memes.” Making a point remains something contested, and even in the untranslatable space,
there can be targeted campaigns of backlash against meme makers, especially those who do not
display a heteronormative portrayal of gender. Thus, meme makers who identify as LGBTQ, do
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not clearly state their gender identity, or share feminist content are at higher risk of receiving
such backlash.
To consider Aseel’s thought as to whether the “fictional” space can be a space for
cultural change, it appears that the untranslatable public exists both out of necessity for safety
and due to a commonality in interests, language, and values and a desire to have discourse in this
elite class. In fact, it can fluctuate between these two sides to form a safe space at times and an
elitist space at others. The untranslatable public can be a space to debate politics and values,
rearrange cultural differences, and make room for seemingly divergent points of view to exist
together. In addition, it is clear from the interviews I conducted that the untranslatable is not
limited to online spaces only. As Sharihan put it:
This has become a way of thinking. It’s like when you grow up with a certain film
culture. Like, if you watch American movies or English-language movies for 10 years of
your life, you start to adopt certain phrases in English like “Oh my God!” or curse in
English. This is the same. When something happens to me in my everyday life, I start to
think and react in the same way that memes are. In the same language that memes are.
Ultimately, untranslatability is a discursive and creative practice that serves as a way for
the global meme elite to exercise its mobility. These meme makers use it to roam among
disparate publics, between publicness and privacy, between safety and risk, between the
mainstream and elite and to practice their agency by participating in the conversations that they
deem relevant to them.

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References
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Barlow, J. P. (1996, February 8). A declaration of the independence of cyberspace.
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
boyd, d., & Marwick, A. E. (2017, January 4). Social privacy in networked publics: Teens’
attitudes, practices, and strategies. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/2gec4
Elsayed, Y. (2016). Laughing through change: Subversive humor in online videos of Arab youth.
International Journal of Communication, 10, 5102–5122.
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/4795
Elsayed, Y., & Zidani, S. (2020). Reimagining the Arab Spring: From limitation to creativity. In
H. Jenkins & S. Shresthova (Eds.), Popular culture and the civic imagination: A
casebook (pp. 162–173). NYU Press.
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually
existing democracy. Social Text, 25/26, 56–80.
Livingstone, S. (2005). Audiences and publics: When cultural engagement matters for the public
sphere. Intellect Books.
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2014). Networked privacy: How teenagers negotiate context in
social media. New Media & Society, 16(7), 1051–1067.
Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcripts. Yale University
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Squires, C. R. (2002). Rethinking the Black public sphere: An alternative vocabulary for
multiple public spheres. Communication Theory, 12(4), 446–468.
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture, 14(1), 49–90.
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Zidani, S. (2020). Arab Americans and participatory culture. In L. Kido-Lopez (Ed.), Race and
media: Critical approaches (pp. 178–189). NYU Press.

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CHAPTER THREE: BEYOND THE 24-HOUR INSTAGRAM STORY MEMEING AND
ARCHIVING
Introduction
One thing that comes up for me a lot, for example when someone annoying calls me, I
think, “Not today, Satan!” That sentence immediately pops in my head. It’s not like I’m
looking for it, but it’s in an archive in the back of my mind.
–Sharihan, a meme maker based in Haifa
Digital culture is often misperceived as being transitory or ephemeral (Bernstein et al.,
2011). Digital objects like internet memes are often seen as having value only in their connection
to fleeting cultural trends. This type of discourse focuses on the virality that some internet
memes achieve by spreading widely, getting many “likes,” or generating many versions and
iterations. One example of such a viral meme is “Say It Again, Dexter,” which shows Dexter, the
genius boy from Cartoon Network’s show Dexter’s Laboratory, whispering into the ear of a
yellow-haired girl with a dangling heart earring, who looks enamored with what he has to say.
This meme spread quickly and widely, versions of it appeared on social media with captions
using stereotypical pronunciations in a variety of accents: Arabic, Spanish, French, Filipino, and
Italian, among others. After trending widely in 2018 and 2019, this meme is now (2020–2021)
rarer. The discourse around memes as transitory or temporary acknowledges the potency of
memes to intervene in politics and make sharp commentary on current events, highlighting the
impact of satire. However, discourse like this is ultimately limited because it misses the deeper
connection that memes have to cultural and historical systems.

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Estroberi is a transliteration of how a primary Spanish speaker might pronounce the word
“strawberry”

Bikimbawder is a transliteration of how some primary Arabic speakers might pronounce the
words “baking powder” (especially the baby boomer generation, or the parents and
grandparents of the youth making these memes)

In this chapter, I intervene in the temporality of which internet memes are conceived to
be a part. Rather than conceiving of them as part of current events and trends that speak only to
the goings-on of the present moment, I argue that memes are part of a longer temporality and
speak to a longer history. I use interviews with international meme makers combined with an
analysis of multilinguistic memes and incorporation of relevant examples from meme culture
more generally. Although memes might reflect a transient trend in popular culture, the content
they bring up is connected to persisting issues or cultural norms or heritage. Memes also are not
transitory in that they are saved and archived, and the way that they circulate means that they are
sometimes brought back by users or used to bring back an old popular culture phenomenon or
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trend. In fact, memes use transitory or trending technology and popular culture to comment on
and intervene in persisting cultural and political issues—for example, taking an image of Game
of Thrones and making it into Ramadan Kareem greeting. They also have their own memory and
library practices.
Memes as Digital Cultural Artifacts
Building on Limor Shifman’s (2014) framing of memes as cultural building blocks, I
conceptualize memes as cultural artifacts that are moved, passed around, edited, stored, archived,
and retrieved. Previous work on digital artifacts has pointed out their incompleteness, or the fact
that digital artifacts “lack the plenitude and stability afforded by traditional items” (Kallinikos et
al., 2013, p. 358). In internet memes, this incompleteness is enacted through the recurring editing
and creation of new versions of a meme, which make the timeline of a meme open ended, and
the dispersing of control over the meme so that any internet user can make decisions related to
the life of the meme.
One of the defining characteristics of memes as digital cultural artifact is the difficulty of
identifying their original instigation. The subreddit r/MemeRestoration on the social networking
platform Reddit is dedicated to tracing the original digital source of a meme or restoring the
quality that deteriorates over time as memes are copied, screenshotted, and sent from one device
to another. This subreddit was created in conversation with another, r/DeepFriedMemes (now
defunct), wherein Reddit users posted images of memes with severely deteriorated quality and a
grainy appearance from extensive use of filters or a high number of reposts and circulation that
affected resolution. The idea of “deep-fried memes” then expanded into a meme culture in which
users deliberately edit images to damage their resolution. Because r/DeepFriedMemes closed,
similar memes are now being posted on r/SauteedMemes, which is described as a subreddit “for
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partially fried memes.” There is something to be said about memes textures, perhaps in a future
project. But because my focus here is the temporality of memes, I use these three subreddits as
examples demonstrating that memes have a complex relationship to time that goes beyond a
current trend. When a meme is created, it can take some time to spread. Once it has spread
widely, it can lose some of its quality and get “sautéed” or “deep fried.” It can also later be
restored, even if the trend (or peak of its circulation) has ended.

An image posted on r/MemeRestoration. The description reads: “Blinking White Guy
(carefully adjusted upscale with de-noising and color correction using an HD PNG
screenshot of the original livestream w/ lossless cropping) (2160x1123px).”

A meme posted on r/SauteedMemes that was deliberately edited to create low resolution akin
to deep-fried memes

Memes are also unique digital cultural artifacts in the way they are grouped: e.g.,
Shifman’s (2014) definition of internet memes as a group of digital objects as well as the popular
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understanding of group memes based on an image or text that is consistent or repeated across the
different variations in the same group. See, for example, the two variations of the “Say It Again,
Dexter” meme previously referenced. Deep investigations of a single internet meme can show
how each variation can be part of a different cultural conversation. Researching multilinguistic
memes in different cultural and political contexts reveals just how diverse these conversations
can be. An example of this divergence is the meme of “Pepe the Frog,” which originated in a
comic series made by Matt Furie with no political intentions, hegemonic or otherwise. Once it
began spreading online, however, some internet users, primarily on 4Chan and Reddit, began to
use the image of Pepe in racist, misogynist, and anti-Semitic memes. This version of Pepe
overpowered the original, so much so that it got designated as a hate symbol by the Anti-
Defamation League (Roy, 2016). If Pepe went right in the United States, it went left in China.
Pepe became a completely different symbol in China, where recently in Hong Kong, protesters
used the image of Pepe the Frog as an expression of resistance. Memes and stickers (images used
in messaging apps) depict the frog in different situations representing Chinese youth’s affect of
disillusionment. Very recently, prodemocracy protesters in Hong Kong protesters brought signs
with illustrations of Pepe with them to the picket line. In an interview with South China Morning
Post (Ko, 2019), Hongkong resident Paper Chu draws on Daoist philosophy to explain that Pepe
as a symbol is akin to water: “Water is fluid, can take many shapes, and it’s not easy to grasp or
capture—those are its unique attributes. The various forms that Pepe is able to take is also quite
representative of this” (para. 20). Pepe the Frog memes also exist in Arabic, Spanish, and
Hebrew, among other languages, and in each context, Pepe takes on a slightly similar but also
different meaning and fits into the relations of meaning that exist in that context. The
disillusionment or ambivalent look on Pepe’s face is consistent, but the situations in which
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internet users put the frog are different and therefore, so are the political uses.
As digital cultural artifacts, memes are part of a continuous set of parallel dialogues that
takes place across multiple online and offline spaces. Different meanings of Pepe spread across
4Chan, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc. Some are hand drawn or
painted on picket-line signs, whereas others are virtual depictions of daily life affect or political
expressions. Some meanings of Pepe cross each other, whereas others share only the image of
the frog.

Pepe the Frog used as a resistance symbol in Hong Kong

By framing memes as cultural artifacts rather than viral trends, I align them closer to the
cultural and historical conversations of which they are a part. This approach to memes can shed
light on the intervention internet memes make (or try to make) beyond transitory current events
and look at the direction they are trying to push culture toward. Langdon Winner (1980) argues
that technological artifacts contain political properties in several ways: first, through a design or
arrangement that serves as a way to settle an issue in a community and second, by having a
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compatibility with a particular kind of political relationship. Because of the flexibility and
malleability of digital artifacts, or what Kallinikos et al. (2013) labeled as “incompleteness,” it is
vital to understand the context in which they are created, edited, and disseminated to unpack
their politics (Winner, 1980). Thus, digital artifacts like memes are tied to a larger and longer
social, political, and historical context than the current moment in which they are created and
circulated.
Why are Memes Seen as Transitory?
Meme culture has characteristics that tie memes to the current moment and make them
seem transitory. Some of these characteristics relate to design features or decisions of platforms
and how memes are disseminated and circulated, whereas others relate to their connection to
current events, trending topics, and rapidly changing trends.
Design Characteristics
Memes circulate in many ways, making lack of organization one of the fundamental
characteristics of their circulation. On some popular social networking platforms for sharing
memes like Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram, content is commonly organized by prioritizing what
is new and gaining attention (through clicks, likes, shares, or comments), which might contribute
to a sense of ephemerality of the older content. On Instagram, memes are often shared through
the Stories feature, which is automatically removed from the followers’ visibility after 24 hours.
Both Bshara and Aseel mentioned Instagram Stories as their primary method of sharing their
memes. Similar features exist on other social networking platforms, like Twitter’s fleets or
WhatsApp’s status. Another feature of this lack of organization is that memes can be shared on
multiple platforms simultaneously, often also circulate in private messages between individuals
or groups, and can be copied through screenshots and circulated even if they are in a 24-hour
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setup.
Connection to the Current Moment
Meme makers I interviewed explained that often the way they make a meme is by
picking up on a trend in meme culture. “Oh, there’s definitely a clear process!” Bshara said. He
named two routes for creating a meme: In one route, he chooses a trending meme template, then
identifies aspects from his lived experience that fit into that template and makes a collection of
memes using that template. The other option is to identify a topical theme, something he cares
about or something that irritates him (like hypocrisy in politics or exaggerated wedding parties),
and then scrolls through his meme-generating phone application to find suitable templates for his
message. In this way, meme makers use an existing trend to add their own meanings to meme
culture. Sharihan said that one of her primary goals as a meme maker is to add women’s voices
and experiences to meme culture. It is important to note that although many meme subcultures
and trends are specific to a culture, region, or language, meme flows are highly influenced by
other media flows and trends (trending TV shows, movies, news, etc.), which are dominated
largely by culture from the United States. In that way, meme culture is still partly governed by
the same logics that decide global cultural flows, but meme makers intervene in the meanings
surrounding these flows and can also disrupt parts of them (Zidani, 2020).
These characteristics related to design and circulation connect memes to a current and
transitory moment, and this connection is an important one. Trends and responding to trends by
creating new versions of the same meme contribute to a meme’s spreadability. My argument is
not against a meme’s connection to the current moment, but rather complicating this connection
by saying it goes beyond that. I build here on the work of Walter Benjamin (1986a, 1986b), who
argues that every object (especially ones made for modernity like photography and architecture)
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carries within it the deep history of class struggle. Furthermore, the citational practices of art are
always imbricated within deep time (Benjamin, 1986a, 1986b). Meme makers can use a current
trend to draw connections to long-lasting historical issues, revive a trend, or use a trend to
promote a future they desire. For example, the “Woman Yelling at Cat” meme template (see
following figure) began trending in summer 2019. The meme is based on a screen cap from the
show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and an image of a cat known as Smudge Lord, and it
is used to portray situations featuring a stark discrepancy in the affect of two sides of an
argument. Whereas “the woman” (Taylor Armstrong) is screaming, crying, and pointing a
blaming finger at the cat, the latter appears unbothered and is usually portrayed as doubling
down on what they have said or done. The iteration here portrays a disagreement between people
and the government (no specific government is identified), wherein people are angry that the
government did not keep its promise of lifting lockdown orders after 2 weeks (due to the
COVID-19 pandemic), and the government justifies its stance by saying “I said inshallah [God
willing].” This meme uses a meme trend and current issue (the pandemic) to critique the attitude
of government and comment on the ambivalence of the term inshallah. Although the meme trend
is current, issues like the government not keeping its promises or the term inshallah not
connoting culturally what it means literally are longstanding topics. Thus, using a trending meme
serves to connect viewers to issues beyond the transitory.

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[Citizens]: You said that I could go out in two weeks!!
Government: I said inshallah.

Memeing and Archival Practice
How information is saved and shared online can seem messy. Images and documents
exist in many different formats, and they are quick to change and adapt. Changes in formats and
how digital artifacts are collected or shared happen in disorganized and usually spontaneous
ways. This makes digital archives and digital cultural artifacts appear fragmented, easy to lose,
or as Paul Conway (1996) labels it, “fragile” (p. 3). The user experience design in most
applications and websites in which memes circulate (such as the Twitter timeline or Instagram
feed) are designed to automatically and continually refresh to load new content and have a built-
in endless scroll, making it difficult to return to or find content again.
Amateur and fan archivists create what De Kosnik (2016) calls “rogue archives”;
archives that are created independently by nonprofessional memory workers who aim to circulate
information widely to decentralize information. These rogue archives present an example that
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pushes us to think about how archives in the digital era might take on different forms. Rather
than organized top-down or institutionalized archives, we begin to see the formation of
participatory and creative archives, some of which (like in the case of De Kosnik’s rogue
archives) are value driven, aiming to democratize information. Others, as I demonstrate here in
the case of meme making, are ad hoc and participate in archival practices for needs like ease of
access to meme templates, recording or documenting creative work, and participating in
conversations with the people around them or with history.
Collecting
Memes are collected for use and reuse online in many ways. Meme makers participate in
ad hoc archiving practices and use existing ad hoc archives. These archives are made for
purposes related to creating memes and participating in meme conversations. They include
things like images and GIFs that can be used as a reaction in conversations, trending meme
templates, and memes that resonate with those who created the archive. When I asked meme
makers about their process for creating memes, many mentioned using existing libraries of meme
templates that exist on websites or smartphone applications, where they can easily download
their desired template. Bshara, a 35-year-old meme maker from Haifa, Israel, explained that one
way he creates a meme is to browse a collection of meme templates, such as one contained in a
meme-generating app, and see what sparks an idea. Alternatively, if he already has an idea, then
he browses the meme library to find the template that fits with the point he seeks to make though
the meme. Meme makers also create personal libraries of memes. Sha3banu explained that he
has a library of reaction videos and memes saved in albums on his phone, and he can go back to
it when these reactions are relevant for a post he wants to publish on Instagram or in a chat group
conversation with friends.
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Another example of collecting and archiving practices related to meme making are meme
pages and accounts themselves, which can serve as a space for saving and categorizing memes.
For example, Hager runs a meme page on Instagram with her sister where they post memes.
These memes are not all created by Hager and her sister; rather, some are memes that they find
themselves and others are memes submitted to them by fans or friends. The core connector
among the memes is that they are considered funny by Hager, her sister, and their audience and
that their content mixes Arab and American culture. In this way, Hager’s meme page becomes an
archival collection of multicultural memes, and she and her sister become curators who make
decisions regarding what is included in that archival collection.
Similarly, the meme content collected as research data for this dissertation was recorded
and documented by using screenshots of memes that mix language, thus creating a type of
archival collection of multilinguistic memes. I collected these memes using different tools and
sources. This included identifying memes on Instagram and saving them using the bookmarking
tool on the application. I also received contributions from individuals and downloaded images or
took screenshots of memes from Facebook, Weibo, and Twitter. These memes had to be stored
in an organized system that I could return to as needed to pull up memes for analysis or give
examples in my writing, in a way that is similar to how Sha3banu described his personal meme
library.
Thus, meme makers and others who engage with memes, be it through fandom or
research, for example, become a type of what De Kosnik (2016) labeled as rogue archivists.
They (or perhaps, we) are nonprofessional memory workers participating in creating and sharing
collections of digital cultural artifacts to make information available to a wider audience. I say
they are a “type” of rogue archivists and not exactly rogue archivists because, as I outline here,
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the work that meme makers do is different. And although it does have political intentions and
does make interventions, these are not exactly the same intentions as what De Kosnik (2016)
outlined as rogue archivists, who start out with decentralizing information sources being their
main goal. So, although meme collections are “rogue” in similar ways and are participatory and
creative, this initial difference in their catalyst is worth pointing out. This is not to say that meme
makers do not have political goals from the onset of making their meme pages or collections.
Many do, in fact, set out with a mission, like the admin of LGBT Sarcasm Society, who started
the page aiming to combat homophobia and misogyny, or Sharihan, whose goal is to add Arab
women’s voices and experiences to meme culture.
Recollecting
Memes bring up cultural and political issues that precede them. As cultural artifacts, they
draw a connection between meme culture and longstanding historical and cultural traditions and
problems, and even turn into a way of marking or archiving certain moments. Gayle Wald (2009)
explains that historical knowledge is made and remade through memes. Wald uses the example
of the meme “A queer Black woman invented rock-and-roll” in reference to Sister Rosetta
Tharpe to unpack how creating and circulating memes acts as a radical politics of remembering
that connects memory and memes to larger struggles against the erasure of Black bodies from
history.
In my interview with Aseel, a meme maker from Palestine, she said that a good meme
captures a lot without using many words. She uses memes to capture what she goes through in
her everyday life, “taking things that happen in daily life or habit, like when someone travels and
leaves the lights on, then moving them to a meme to make it into a joke or something funny.”
Sha3banu, a meme maker from Nazareth, Israel, likened the practice of making memes daily to
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keeping a diary where he can put down the stress of each day. One example of how memes can
mark a moment is “That Moment When” memes, which build on a meme template in which the
text begins with “that moment when…” and is accompanied by an image that illustrates the
feeling or reaction that a person has in such a moment. The following memes, for example, use
meme templates and scenes from movies like Toy Story and Black Panther to illustrate reactions
or feelings in certain moments. “That Moment When” memes rely on the commonality of past
experiences that audiences and meme makers share, making the reaction or feeling illustrated in
the meme recognizable and relatable. It also extends this experience by documenting it in a
digital cultural artifact and circulating it among others. Within the documenting of these
moments, “That Moment When” memes can also offer an intervention through the critique or
commentary they make on the cited moment. In these memes, it is possible to identify a critique
of the mixed messages a woman might receive from her crush, a self-aware joke about time
wasted learning a skill like rolling cigarettes instead of preparing food, or a push for Arab
weddings to be more accepting of vegetarianism.

- That moment when you spend a night of a lifetime with your crush
-Then you wake up to a screenshot from your friend showing that he requested to add her [as
a friend on social media]

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-That moment when you discover that rolling grape leaves is not the same as rolling
cigarettes
-Years of academy training wasted!

-That moment when an Arab person attends a wedding and says they are vegetarian
-“We don’t do that here”

To a certain extent, the meme trend itself relies on this conversation with existing
traditions and cultural phenomena to exist and spread. For a meme to “catch on” and become a
trend, different iterations must be created and circulated, and the way this process takes place is
by applying longstanding cultural meanings to the meme. In the movie poster remake that
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became a meme (see following figure), the longstanding culture of dancing in the street in rural
China is juxtaposed with the Hollywood movie La La Land.

A remake of the poster for the Hollywood movie La La Land

Another example of how memes can converse and negotiate with history is a trend both
in image and text-only (such as tweets) memes of saying “I’ll tell my kids this was…” These
memes jokingly juxtapose contemporary popular culture figures that seem to diverge from each
other and make a statement about how they intend to write them into history. In my interview
with Hager, who makes memes with her sister, she brought up one example that they shared on
their meme page in which someone tweeted a photo of Egyptian actress and dancer Fifi Abdo
captioned with “Gonna tell my kids this is Kim Kardashian.” Hager pointed out that her aims in
making memes are to connect to her Arab cultural heritage in a celebratory way that goes beyond
the grief and oppression that she feels are inflicted on her people. As a self-defined “third culture
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kid” and immigrant in the United States, she also wanted to use meme creation and circulation as
an opportunity for herself and others to learn about Arab culture. Hager’s aims intersect with the
admin of the Facebook and Instagram page LGBT Sarcasm Society, who said that he uses stills
from Egyptian films for many of his meme templates because people know them across Arabic-
speaking communities and not only in Egypt.

A tweet saying “Gonna tell me kids this is Kim Kardashian” with a photo of Egyptian actress
and dancer Fifi Abdou

When it comes to multilinguistic memes in particular, the connection to history is also
expressed in the very circumstances that bring languages to intermix. This dissertation looks at
memes that mix Arabic with English, Arabic with Hebrew, Hebrew with English, Chinese and
English, and Spanish and English, among others. There are historical reasons as to why these
languages are being mixed, much of which are imbricated in colonial and imperial legacies. The
creation and circulation of memes that mix languages thus, in and of itself, is already a
conversation with these legacies.
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Conceding
boyd and Marwick (2017) identify the affordances of networked publics, two of which
are related to memory and archive practices. One is persistence, or how digital cultural artifacts
are automatically recorded and archived, and the other is replicability, the ease of duplication of
content (through saving images and videos, taking screenshots or recording them, etc.). Although
beyond the scope of this chapter, it is still important to note that there is an invisible archive
being created through these data that are shared and disseminated on social media. Memes
circulate on social networking platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others, which
hold these data without a clear message to users as to what they should use them for. Images that
are shared in private messages, stories that are automatically deleted after 24 hours, and posts
that users decide to delete are all saved in social media companies’ data collections. On
Instagram, for example, users can request access to their full archive, which contains every
image and video they ever posted or sent through the application (including deleted and removed
ones). But what the company does with these archives is not clear. The practices of media
companies regarding collection of data and the lack of transparency around them have been
studied by many scholars, who found that data are collected without consent and used to build
artificial intelligence systems that often decontextualize and simplify the profiles of their users
and ultimately create biased, racist, sexist, or otherwise oppressive systems (Crawford, 2021;
Noble, 2018). Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias (2019) describe how media companies see
their users less as human and more as sources of profit that they can get through extracting data,
and they have labeled this phenomenon “data colonialism.” This phenomenon could pose a risk
to the privacy and freedom of meme makers and ultimately impact what memes look like in the
future. I mention this ongoing ethical issue to highlight that the relationship between digital
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cultural artifacts and history has many players, each with a different level of involvement and
decision-making power. The relationship between multilinguistic meme makers and the
platforms on which they operate is a particularly interesting one, especially considering that most
of these platforms are U.S.-centric corporate media companies that are largely built around
language and value systems that center the United States and are especially profit driven rather
than value driven. An example of how this relationship plays out came up when the admin of
LGBTQ Sarcasm Society mentioned that groups of “Jihad brigades” targeted the page by
reporting it repeatedly to Facebook, which lead Facebook to accuse the page of violating its
values and threaten to shut it down. This example is one way in which multiple levels of
oppression can work in tandem and would be interesting to explore further.
The practices I labeled collecting and recollecting in this section fall under what Diana
Taylor (2003) might call “the repertoire” and what De Kosnik (2016) calls “digital repertoires,”
through which the digital archive is continually enacted and performed. The repertoire for Diana
Taylor comes out of cultural memory, which is archived and preserved through its recollection
and performance. People take these actions over and over to preserve cultural artifacts, like
copying, mimicking, and performing them. As digital items that are created with awareness of
one another, circulated, imitated, and transformed by many users (Shifman, 2014), memes fall
neatly within the definition of digital repertoires. Rather than only recording and documenting,
meme makers remix and recreate, converse and reappropriate, or repurpose and reclaim. De
Kosnik (2016) predicts that digital repertoires will outlast digital archives (the institutionally
practiced collections of documents, maps, and other cultural artifacts that are not subject to
change and are even protected from change). This makes it imperative to continue paying
attention to meme creation and meme memory practices in the future, because as Taylor (003)
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argues, repertoires are preserved through their enactment.
A New Archive, but Not Necessarily a Liberative One
In the arts, the distinction between archaic/modernist is often not pertinent, in that both
share a refusal of the conventions of mimetic realism. It is thus less a question of
juxtaposing the archaic and the modern than of deploying the archaic in order,
paradoxically, to modernize, in a dissonant temporality which combines past imaginary
communities with an equally imaginary future utopia. (Shohat & Stam, 1994, p. 295)
Like in Shohat and Stam’s (1994) discussion of art, in internet memes, the future and past
are not separated. Rather, they are brought together to question discourses of cultural dominance
and push for a desired future. Bshara tries to add a feminist voice in the discourse of Arab men,
Aseel aims to interpose her perspective and daily life in an oppressive context, Sharihan wants to
introduce Arab women’s perspective into meme culture, LGBT Sarcasm Society’s admin makes
memes to build a celebratory gay culture into Arabic social media discourse, and Hager and her
sister–collaborator make cultural connections and promote fluency in their Arab heritage. These
are all interventions that multilinguistic meme makers forge in both meme culture and history.
Through participatory practices (à la Jenkins, 1992), meme makers expand digital
archives and enrich how we think about archive formats. Without these meme makers’ archival
practices and the collections they create, we might not have meme archives. De Kosnik (2016)
discusses artificial intelligence and automated digital archiving tools, which she argues fall short
of capturing all the information. Meme makers’ ad hoc archiving practices are in line with De
Kosnik’s call for a humanistic approach to archiving, because these meme collections could not
exist without the intentional cherry picking and human design of themes and organization into
pages; or at least, these archives would not exist in the same way. This very research would also
not be possible if I relied only on artificial intelligence or automated methods to create the
collection of memes I analyze. No one hashtag or online repository exists for multilinguistic
memes and thus, a human-centered and human-steered approach is necessary for examining,
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understanding, and creating archives of digital cultural artifacts.
Memes also allow people to insert their own voice by creating their own digital artifacts
and collections or choosing what to circulate and thus, they get more choice in what goes into the
digital archive. Meme makers are not just pressured by a dominant trend. Rather, a successful
meme is actually one that knows the trend fluently enough to break away from it. It uses the
trend to transform the meme and in turn, transform its surrounding culture. This participatory
aspect of meme culture may point to a liberative potential, which I unpack in detail here.
The liberative potential stems from the fact that memory practices in memes are out of
the hands of corporate or nationally branded institutions, and rather in the hands of amateur
creators, the rogue archivists. However, this power is limited because the platforms they exist on
are still bound by these power dynamics of corporate media companies. These companies force
people to concede their archives (including everything they post and message) and personal data
in return for “free” use of their platforms. Furthermore, although meme repertoire practices can
act to discursively counter oppressive powers of erasure and cultural dominance, they have their
limitations. For one, they ultimately continue to operate in a structure of commodification and
are not outside of corporate and capitalist logics for success and spread of information. In this
way, they reaffirm Benjamin’s (1986a, 1986b) argument that the history of class struggle is
passed on through objects of modernity. As Gayle Wald (2009) explains regarding the Sister
Rosetta Tharpe meme, “The entanglement of counter-historical narratives in such structures of
commodification and reification is a reminder that no practice of memory is free of the systems
of power that condition cultural production and its reception by consuming publics” (p. 5). So,
for example, although De Kosnik (2016) defines rogue archives as accessible to all without any
paywalls or institutional barriers, many meme rogue and ad hoc archives discussed here require
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that participants have a smartphone, download an app, create an account, give up their privacy,
and grant access to their personal data. This is not free, decentralized, or democratic access. In
addition, many meme accounts now lean toward being private, requiring that members request
access and wait for the meme maker’s approval to follow and access their account. This is done
as part of a larger promotional strategy that Instagram influencers use to increase the number of
followers (Leaver et al., 2020).
The reasons for these limitations relate not only to the corporate media industry of which
meme creation and circulation is a part, but also to the online publics to which multilinguistic
meme makers belong. This public experiences both privilege and oppression, and sometimes is
seen looking for an exclusive private space for sharing culture. This need for privacy and
exclusivity is explored in more detail in the previous chapter. However, the point I want to raise
here is that the exclusivity and privacy of what I called the untranslatable public may pose a
limitation to the scalability or reach of change.
What remains important to pay attention to regarding practices of memes and memory is
that there is great room for negotiation in the ongoing conversations that take place between the
trendy and transformative aspects of meme culture. As a meme trends, and as meme makers
attempt to attach their own meanings to it, a conversation takes place both with the trend and the
meaning of the trend as well as with cultural values and historical legacies. This was evident in
the example of the “Pepe the Frog” meme, which took on different meanings over time and
space, was appropriated and reappropriated by alt-right meme makers in the United States, and
later was used as a democratic protest symbol in Hong Kong. Another example of negotiations in
meme trends took place on Instagram when many women posted a black-and-white photo of
themselves with the caption “Challenge accepted.” This campaign started in July 2020, and as
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these posts caught on and turned into a meme, the purpose from the outset of the campaign was
lost. Women were invited to participate in the campaign with a neoliberal and performative
feminist statement, which posed the campaign as a way for women to support and empower one
another. This message erased the original meaning of the campaign, which was geared at
protesting increased and persistent cases of femicide in Turkey. The original campaign draws on
black-and-white photos that are often posted of victims of femicide, aiming to send the message
that “this could be me.” Yet what is interesting about this case is that the same site of erasure (in
this case, meme creation on Instagram) was also the site used for retrieval and revival of that
memory surrounding the origins of the campaign. Activists created Instagram posts with an
explanation of the goals of the campaign, and Instagram users who participated in the erasure
also participated in refocusing the attention on the original meaning (Nguyen, 2020).
I raise this example to end on a note that emphasizes the complicated negotiations around
memory practices that take place in meme culture. Meme makers create digital cultural artifacts
to converse with existing memories and memetic archives and create new ones. They also use
them to continually negotiate what is remembered or forgotten. They can create, disrupt, or use a
transitory trend to connect to a larger issue related to current events, cultural values, or historical
legacies. Thus, perhaps the only liberative potential in meme archives is their constant change
and ongoing negotiation. Although it is not possible for meme makers to create and circulate
memes outside of existing power relations, meme makers can avert some of these limitations
through continuous creativity. Meme makers can hold power by continuously shifting between
the trendy and the transformative aspects of meme making, between established norms and
creative practices.
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CHAPTER FOUR: ZANAAKHA—THE DEFEATED AFFECT AND SARCASTIC
HUMOR OF MULTILINGUISTIC MEMES
Introduction

-When I get all dressed up just to sit in the living room during the holidays

-When a Muslim feels depressed
-Surat Yusef [a Quranic sura meant to grant tranquility and relieve worry]

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-When the Russian [Israeli security guard] asks me “Carrying any weapons?” and I say I
have a tank in my bag
-I have achieved comedy

-When I am trying to give my mom hints about my crush
-It’s (not) a boy

In the multilinguistic memes shown here, an underlying affect conveys a sense of defeat
or feeling of resignation: I dress up just to spend the holidays sitting in the living room, treat my
maladies with remedies I know will not work, make jokes to an audience I know to be
unreceptive, and do not try to communicate my authentic self directly even though hints will not
do. Moreover, the humor in these memes is sarcastic, cheesy, and gimmicky; they compel a
chuckle but might not have you rolling on the floor laughing. This humor may even invoke
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displeasure or a cringe reaction.
And yet despite that sense of defeat, the memes still stir emotion. They point to an
annoyance, an itch. There remains a contempt, a critique, an irritation that is delivered through
the humor. To describe the sarcastic resignation in multilinguistic memes, I use the colloquial
Arabic term zanaakha, a term that captures both the humor and affect of multilinguistic memes. I
argue that multilinguistic memes embody an irritated affect but also stir and irritate. As the
humor and affect of the global meme elite, zanaakha is both a reflection of and intervention in
their dual status under global capitalism.
This chapter explores multilinguistic meme content and interviews with international
meme makers to examine the relationship between affect and humor in internet memes. I build
on Marcella Szablewicz’s (2014) analysis of the “Diaosi” meme in China, in which she
conceptualizes internet memes as “structures of feeling” (as noted by Williams, 1977). I extend
this to a framework that combines the analysis of humor and affect and apply this analysis to a
transnational level that examines multiple memes and incorporates data from interviews with
meme makers. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the structures of feeling in
which global meme makers (usually youth, broadly defined as between the ages of 16 and 35)
operate and how they intervene in these structures.
Affect and Internet Memes
Clough (2008) coined the term “affective turn” to refer to an academic trend of works
that turned to affect beginning in the late 1990s to explain forms of embodied feeling
experienced outside the registers of speech, signification, communication, and meaning
(Cartwright, 2015). Affect theory is largely based on Spinoza’s (1959) idea that we do not yet
know what the body is capable of, and affect theory deals with this realm of “yet-ness”
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(Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 4) and examines its movement. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa
Gregg (2010) explain that affect rises amid inbetween-ness; in the body’s capacity to act and be
acted upon, to affect and be affected. Deleueze and Guattari’s (1983) work focuses on affect as a
potential locus for cultural and political theories. They explore the significance of affect,
particularly in ethological terms of bodily capacity, which locates affect amid things and
relations and in the complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and worlds
simultaneously (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). In Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai (2009) considers
negative emotions like envy, irritation, paranoia, and anxiety. She ties these feelings to the
inequalities and alienating effects of late capitalism and suggests that these affects are indexes of
social conditions of “obstructed agency” (p. 3). She draws a connection between affect and the
material political states and views the potential of these emotions for opposition to our current
state (Ngai, 2009).
The importance of studying affect in memes lies in the potential for affect to be a locus
for cultural and political theories (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010). Memes
serve as cultural building blocks that bridge personal and political meanings (Shifman, 2014), the
past and present (Hristova, 2013), and seriousness and silliness or politics and humor (Mina,
2019; Shifman, 2014; Tay, 2014). Thus, it is no surprise that questions related to worldview,
hope (or lack thereof), and self-awareness enter the vessel of memes. With the exception of
regional and nation-state-focused case studies that address cultures separately (Makhortykh &
González Aguilar, 2020; Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2018; Phillips & Milner, 2017; Szablewicz,
2014), scholarship investigating internet memes and affect from a transnational perspective is
thus far limited. Focusing on multilinguistic memes allows us to investigate the transnational
affective realm in which memes operate and what they do to manifest or contest global relations
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of power.
The underlying affect of defeat and resignation that I found in multilinguistic memes is in
line with other scholars’ findings. Namely, previous research has shown that the internet is full
of mixed experiences and contradictions. Studies have shown how memes can serve as vehicles
for articulating emotions related to specific political and national contexts (Makhortykh &
González Aguilar, 2020; Nissenbaum & Shifman, 2018). The importance and power of affect in
the digital era is also evidenced by the nation-state’s deliberate demobilization of emotions and
selective promotion of emotions that benefit the state (Yang, 2018).
Online expressions, however, move in different ways that are not necessarily in line with
the state’s interests. Internet users utilize creative means of expression to speak to their
circumstances. They can challenge and reinforce conventional norms simultaneously
(Szablewicz, 2014). Meme makers express disappointment and sometimes even despair, but
online debates and expressions are also used to imagine and enact alternative desires and forms
of mobility (Szablewicz, 2014). In the case of the “Diaosi” meme in China, for example,
Szablewicz (2014) writes:
By embracing their status as diaosi, young people are explicitly acknowledging the unfair
and sometimes impossible standards of success by which they are being judged. While
working within the confines of a dominant ideology that would frame them as losers,
young people who adopt the diaosi label do so cynically, thus effectively challenging the
notion that their lifestyle is something of which to be ashamed. (p. 271)
This example shows how memes can be ambivalent and hold mixed positions
simultaneously. By using the term diaosi—which literally means “loser”—to refer to themselves,
meme makers lean into their status as losers while concurrently expressing critique about that
status. Their use of the term diaosi can be seen as a sort of reclamation of the title forced on
youth by the dominant ideology, whereas through cynical self-deprecation, they imagine and
present nonhegemonic ways of thinking and being.
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According to Phillips and Milner (2017), internet culture itself can be categorized as
ambivalent. They examine online behaviors like trolling, focusing on the United States, and
demonstrate how online behaviors that can wound can also be harnessed toward social justice,
how the social is mixed with the antisocial, and what is generative and destructive are often
interchangeable. The reason the internet is highly ambivalent is because certain ambivalent
behaviors like satirizing brands, mocking celebrities, and joking about tragedy are amplified
quickly to many people (Phillips & Milner, 2017). This is part of a broader framework wherein
the logics of neoliberalism expand into popular culture, into our individual and personal
understanding of ourselves as commodities. The ambivalence here stems from the contradiction
whereby neoliberalism provides a framework in which individuals must market themselves
based on a capitalist system that, for example, brands market commodities by trying to earn
visibility, but also creates room for opposition and shifting norms by attaching new meanings to
commodities or practices. This instability of meaning under neoliberalism produces ambivalence
(Banet-Weiser, 2012).
With the ambivalence, mixed experience, and contradictory expressions on the internet,
affect still moves—it says something, it does something. In internet memes in particular, affect
works hand in hand with humor. The sarcasm, cynicism, and absurdity of internet humor is full
of incongruity that contributes to the affect of ambivalence. Affect and humor work together to
invite some people in and exclude others. They can oppress or subvert. And as the rest of this
chapter argues, they simultaneously reveal and intervene in broader culture and politics.
From the Outside Memeing In
Multilinguistic meme makers that I interviewed expressed feeling neither here nor there,
or somewhere in between. Many identified as marginalized, oppressed outsiders in their own
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communities, or “third culture kids.” They expressed feeling ignored or misunderstood by the
world. In the words of one interviewee, Aseel: “Our everyday context that we live in is
oppressive, as opposed to the fictional context [of memes and popular culture].” Aseel invoked
the 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in which John Perry Barlow (1996)
speaks of the internet as a space where nation-states have no authority and cannot impose their
rules. “Globalization ignores my specific oppressive context,” Aseel said. “It just makes me
think: Is the fictional space the place where we can make change?”
This feeling of extraneousness works alongside meme makers’ self-awareness. Meme
makers situate themselves intentionally and know who they are. In the interviews, they said
things like “this is what we’re like” and that their meme-making practices are guided by being
“true” and “authentic” to who they are. This self-awareness is also illustrated in the fact that
meme makers often make fun of themselves in their memes. Similar to Szablewicz’s (2014) case
of the “Diaosi” meme, multilinguistic memes also use self-aware and self-deprecating humor. In
the memes at the beginning of this chapter, meme makers (or the “I” in the meme) are not
portrayed as winning at life. Rather, they are making decisions that they know are useless:
getting dressed despite not going out, using Quranic verses instead of medication, making a joke
despite knowing it is not a good one nor has good timing, or using hints instead of actually
coming out of the closet.
The extraneousness and self-awareness that meme makers express feeling do not,
however, equate to feeling subordinate. In fact, many saw a unique opportunity in digital media
to share knowledge, express their opinions, and critique certain social norms or political issues.
Aseel, for example, said, “Memes can express opinions pretty easily, and I am a person who
likes to express their opinion.” The admin of the LGBTQ Sarcasm Society page expressed that in
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his meme creation, he aims for “something beyond laughter.” That which is beyond laughter
refers to making a point about culture, religion, gender, and politics. It is about changing
people’s minds and opinions and raising awareness. In this way, extraneousness and self-
awareness are also affects that reassert meme makers’ view of themselves as unique and in turn,
become productive affect in that they encourage them to continue creating memes to share their
opinions or make their points.
Even in a broader context of global cultural flows, it is notable that although
multilinguistic memes use English language and Western (primarily American) culture
extensively, they do not speak to Western culture. Rather, multilinguistic memes are addressed
inward and target the in-group of meme makers—that is, other youth who also consume and
understand the globally dominant culture from the United States, but do not see it as superior or
as the end all, be all of culture. Thus, rather than trying to speak to and appease the West or see
the West as their target audience, creators and consumers of multilinguistic memes use their
common knowledge of the cultural industries to speak to one another.
Irritating Our Way to the Top? Zanaakha and the Global Meme Elite’s Dual Class Status
The global meme elite’s feelings of extraneousness are in part a result of its dual
experience of globalization. On one hand, members of the global meme elite are mostly middle-
to middle-upper-class youth with access to higher education (which may include international
higher education) and experiences like travel for tourism or visiting their transnational family
members. This equips the global meme elite with cultural capital and cultural literacy that
situates it alongside a figurative transnational elite. However, as explored in more detail in
Chapter One, the global meme elite does not get to fully enjoy its access to the cultural capital of
globalization, its members often fall outside the racial capital to match the expectations of global
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capitalism (i.e., Whiteness). This translates into experiences of microaggression and racism that
can take the shape of being vetted at borders or being discriminated against by internet platforms,
to name two examples.
This dual status can also be understood in what Sianne Ngai (2009) dubbed “obstructed
agency” (p. 3), an individual or collective sociopolitical suspension or limitation of agency that
she sees as the dilemma that gives rise to ignoble or ugly feelings. Looking at the political
economic place of multilinguistic meme makers intersectionally shows that the agency they get
from their economic status clashes with the agency they (do not) get from their non-Whiteness.
The memes included in this study were made mostly by Arab and Chinese people, with some
from people of Latin American origin and Israelis (the latter possibly being the exception to this
class generalization, but not necessarily). These different groups have varying relationships or
proximity and distance to Whiteness that require a deeper analysis and have been addressed in
entire books (for example, see Gualtieri, 2009; Muñoz, 2020). When it comes to multilinguistic
meme makers, this clash in the race and class intersection produces the obstructed agency that
Ngai (2009) mentions. This obstruction is even more layered if we take into account the
intersection with gender identity, because some of the memes I examine and a few of the meme
makers I interviewed have gay or queer messages and identities, respectively, and might not fit
neatly into the global heteronormative hegemony; some are even in active opposition to it.

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-I’ve got hot sauce in my bag. Swag.
-I’ve got s’hoog [Yemeni hot sauce] in my bag. Damn [using Yemeni-Israeli slang].

Top left: Male depression [hand asking for help from drowning]
Top right: Family [another hand approaching]
Bottom left: Be a man! [approaching hand giving the drowning hand a high-five]
Bottom right: [Hand drowns]

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-Today is International Arabic Language Day
-I like! [in Arabizi, the Internet-born Roman alphabet transliteration of Arabic]

The obstructed agency resulting from the global meme elite’s complex status produces an
affect of irritation or mild anger. To use the memes here as examples, they translate Beyoncé
because their own culture is underrepresented in global cultural flows, they critique society for
harming instead of aiding with problems like depression and reinforcing toxic masculinity, and
they indirectly criticize appreciation of their own culture that happens through Western-
dominated means. This irritation is like an itch—it calls to be scratched, it points to an issue to
say, “There is a problem here.” The intensity of irritation may appear like it is lower than an
affect such as anger or rage, but the irritation is constant—it is always brewing.
Meme makers use humor to voice their irritation. This type of humor, which I call
zanaakha, is a combination of sarcasm and kitsch. Zanaakha ( زﻧ ﺎ ﺧ ﺔ ), pronounced zuh-na-χa, is a
term used in colloquial Palestinian Arabic and comes from the Arabic root ز ن خ (z n kh). Words
stemming from this root usually refer to something foul or unpleasant, such as زﻧ ﺦ (zanikha), a
verb referring to food or oil when it goes bad and develops a foul smell, or ﺗ ﺰ ﻧ ّ ﺦ (tazannakha), a
verb used to refer to a person when they encroach upon someone else. As used in colloquial
Palestinian Arabic, zanaakha refers to a specific type of humor that is gimmicky, even absurd,
and irritating. Examples of zanaakha in everyday life include dad jokes and relentless teasing.
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In multilinguistic memes, zanaakha thrives on puns and kitschy or gimmicky creativity.
Kitsch here is understood as an accessible aesthetic form that does not require prior knowledge
in art or highbrow culture, and its accessibility means it is often used as a derogatory term
(Ortlieb & Carbon, 2019). Zanaakha is a type of humor that is not always trying to be edgy, but
rather often basks in its own kitsch. Zanaakha is born out of the state of obstructed agency and is
a result of affects of defeat, resignation, and irritation that multilinguistic memes and their
makers express. Moreover, zanaakha is also in and of itself irritating. As a cheesy or gimmicky
type of humor, it provokes irritation and conflicting affects. It is not always only funny; it can be
absurd or even annoying. According to Sianne Ngai (2020), its gimmick seems to be either
working too hard or too little, which generates pleasure and displeasure simultaneously.
Similarly, the humor in zanaakha might prompt laughter, but it also triggers and provokes. It
makes you want to say, “Stop it!”

Is the milk owned [a near-homophone of “milk”] or rented?

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-Did you magic?
-Huh?
-Did you eat suhoor?
[Suhoor is the name of the pre-fast meal eaten before dawn during the month of Ramadan. It
sounds similar to the word for magic, sihr.]

-If you’re happy, then everything’s OK
[Jiu is a transliteration that could refer to the character 就 , meaning “then”; here, it also
hints at the character 酒, meaning “wine”]

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-Nothing left to say
[The full Mandarin phrase is 无话说, which when pronounced in a northern Chinese dialect
(that Mandarin is based on), is transliterated as wú huà shuō, but in some Southern dialects,
H is pronounced F, making huà sound like fuà]

These examples—“Is the milk owned or rented?” “Did you magic?” “If you’re happy,
then everything’s OK,” and “Nothing left to say”—are memes that appear to be working too
little. There is also an underlying self-awareness implying that they know they are working too
little. They are all based on puns and mistranslations and visually appear to have undergone little
editing efforts. It is common for zanaakha in multilinguistic memes to rely on such cross-
linguistic puns and mistranslations. Memes in Mandarin, for example, often build a joke based
on replacing one character (one syllable) from a four-letter structured phrase with an English
profanity. The phrases remain recognizable to other Mandarin speakers, and therein lies the joke.
Zanaakha that is working too hard could include memes that rely on more intertextuality or
labor, like extensive image editing or research to find the right image while creating the meme.
Remade movie posters like the Chinese versions of The Last Emperor and Call Me by Your
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Name or fake performance posters like Marilyn Manson in Jarash, Jordan, can be filed under the
category of gimmicky humor that is working too much (see following figures). “Starter Pack”
memes like the one here also work too much, because they require research and putting together
a set of items, in addition to a deep understanding of the subculture to which the starter pack
alludes.

The Last Emperor
[An image of a person on a bus dressed in costume for work purposes repurposed as a movie
poster for an American film about the last emperor of China directed by Bernardo
Bertolucci]
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Call Me By Your Name
[Images of characters from the 1980s Chinese TV series Journey to the West used in a poster
for an American movie by the Italian director Luca Guadagnino that tells a romantic story
about an international visiting student and his hosts’ son]

Top right corner: Exciting shows await you
Top left corner: After a long wait, he returns to Jarash
Middle text, top to bottom: Jarash; the noisy artist; Marilyn Manson; presents; Sweet
Dreams, Beautiful People, Tainted Love; Southern Stage; Monday 7.10.2012; 8:30 p.m.
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Bottom line: Sponsorships, phone numbers for ordering tickets, and prices

-Old people’s phone starter pack
Top left: Wallet-style phone case
Top right: Font size is set to huge
Bottom left: Low angle of an older adult male wearing glasses with lanyards
Bottom right: A kitschy Arabic good morning meme, common among older adults

Building on Ngai’s (2020) theorization of the gimmick, when zanaakha is working too
little or too hard, it points to the gap between the value of the meme (the commodity) as opposed
to the expectations based on the logics of global capitalism, which extracts commodity value on
surplus labor. Meme creation still largely sits outside of the capitalist system of profit making. In
the words of London-born, Atlanta-raised rapper Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, commonly
known as 21 Savage: “Some n—s make millions. Other n—s make memes.” Examples like Zoë
Roth, who sold her image known as the “Disaster Girl” meme as a nonfungible token for
$500,000 (BBC, 2021), show that memes could become a profitable endeavor. However, this is
yet to be a common case. The multilinguistic meme makers I interviewed do not follow the logic
of capitalist economics because they do not seek revenue for their memes. The memes might
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appear to be working hard, but they are not trying to achieve capitalist profits. Even in the
“meme economy” itself, a system wherein digital culture capital is based on the number of
followers, likes, and shares, the multilinguistic meme makers I interviewed do not seek a large
following or many likes and shares. They seek to make their point or share their memes with
meme fans who share the same values and appreciate the same cultural productions. Thus, there
is an element of surprise, absurdity, and I would argue, audacity in zanaakha. This audacity is
what can provoke laughter. Going back to the Arabic root of the term, zanaakha can be an
encroachment. It provokes and irritates. It brings up contradictory feelings. It is both funny and
kitschy, both irritated and irritating. Thus, it is ambivalent in the sense that Phillips and Milner
(2017) explain as being both this and that, rather than not caring either way. By stepping outside
the logic of the global capitalist (and meme) economy, multilinguistic meme point our attention
to the fact that there is something wrong with this system.
When it comes to multilinguistic meme makers, however, they not highlight the gaps and
issues in the economic side of global capitalism, they also point to issues related to their dual
status and obstructed agency related to their racialization. The irritated affect comes from a
hypocrisy that meme makers experience on multiple levels. One, mentioned earlier, relates to the
lack of access to the same elite status that is promised by Western-centered globalization. The
other points to oppressive dynamics in their own cultures. For example, the “Male Depression”
and “When a Muslim Feels depressed” memes shown here call out culture insists it cares about
you, yet harms your health or ignores you instead of coming to your aid. These types of memes
can also be seen as speaking out against irrational or unscientific solutions to problems.
The irritation produced by zanaakha becomes a way for multilinguistic meme makers to
deal with the irritation experienced due to their obstructed agency and dual class status. By
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creating an annoyance and an itch, zanaakha produces a social irritation that points to critiques of
globalization’s double standards. Importantly, the global meme elite’s critique of capitalism does
not look outside the capitalist system. It is born out of their political and economic status, reflects
their access to economic and cultural capital, and asks to extend that access. This is not a critique
that asks for the dismantling of global capitalism, nor is it asking to imagine alternative systems
to exist alongside but apart from global capitalism. The global meme elite asks for more capital
and further inclusion in the system of globalization. Thus, when a meme maker says that they
want to celebrate their culture in a way that goes beyond grief and oppression, that can be seen as
seeking more cultural capital. The global meme elite already belongs to a relatively higher class,
but it also uses practices of exclusion to reproduce its status whereby it is elite.
The Punctures of Irritation: Speaking Truth to … Each Other
The global rhythm of memes is punctuated by cultural trends dominated by American
meme trends and media culture. Multilinguistic memes include scenes from films and TV shows
or music videos and meme templates that come predominantly from the United States. However,
multilinguistic meme makers transform these punctuations into punctures or interventions,
communicating their own voices of critique, humor, and desire for change. The affect of defeat
reflected in the zanaakha of these memes might seem counterproductive to civic efforts. To
circle back to Aseel’s question about whether the fictional space can be an independent space for
change, I argue that zanaakha has a purpose. The political implication of zanaakha is that
irritation, in and of itself, poses critique.
I use the term “punctures” here to emphasize the material work of zanaakha. It itches,
pokes, and pricks. Punctures also echo the concept of “cultural acupuncture” (Jenkins, 2017), a
way of creating cultural change that is based on participation rather than resistance. Jenkins
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draws on the example of the Harry Potter Alliance, the fan activist group that coined the term
cultural acupuncture. This type of cultural change is based on fans taking ownership of popular
culture and making their demands of the industry rather than stepping outside it. The aim of
cultural acupuncture is to redirect cultural flows. The global meme elite operates in a cultural
acupuncturist way whereby it poses criticism toward global capitalism that does not stand against
global capitalism, but rather asks for more cultural capital. They try to reach for capital, for
representation and status.
Members of the global meme elite act as cultural acupuncturists when they use symbols
of popular culture to redirect the flows toward themselves. They insert their own voices into
meme culture and code their messages in a way that makes them understandable only to those in
their in-group. Thus, the critique that zanaakha poses and the irritation that it brings up are both
pointed inward. Multilinguistic memes pose a critique of global capitalism. However, rather than
following the adage of “speaking truth to power,” the global meme elite speaks truth to itself. Its
members pose their criticism among themselves.
Zanaakha encapsulates well the kitschy, gimmicky humor and defeated ambivalent affect
of multilinguistic memes. It communicates the feeling of irritation that is both the cause and the
effect of zanaakha. This irritation calls for a scratch, a change in the current state or condition.
Ultimately, however, zanaakha—similar to what Ngai (2009) writes about irritation and other
ugly feelings—is noncathartic. It does not lead to satisfaction or a purifying release (Ngai, 2009).
Similarly, the punctures caused by irritation in this case seems like a surface-level change rather
than looking into the underlying conditions that caused this irritation.
The ambivalence of zanaakha, the fact that is caused by and also produces irritation,
combined with the fact that its criticism is directed inward, prompts reflection on the political
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implications of affect and digital media: Is the global meme elite akin to an “affected public”
(Papacharissi, 2012), or is zanaakha better described in terms of “disaffection” (Yao, 2021)? In
other words, do multilinguistic meme makers come together in their shared irritation? Or do they
come together to step away from it, using what Yao (2021) terms “unfeeling”? Is zanaakha
social? Or is it antisocial? As a way of dealing with its political and economic position, the
global meme elite excludes itself from wider publics and affects that are deemed acceptable by
global capitalist hegemony. Both affect and disaffection are generative concepts for
understanding the diverse goals of meme makers. Although a few meme makers I interviewed
seek to change public opinion, many are more interested in being conversation with other meme
makers or like-minded youth. Thus, zanaakha can be both social and antisocial. However, using
the concepts of affective publics and disaffection to understand the broader political implications
of multilinguistic memes reveals that multilinguistic meme makers are irritated by their dual
status and trying to reach for more capital, yet in their search for safety and exceptionalism, their
critique is pointed inward, making it seem more along the lines of disaffection. That does not
take away the political critique in the global meme elite’s creative work; rather, it explains its
inward-facing nature, given the intersections of multilinguistic meme makers’ identity and global
digital and affective politics. Because meme trends, their economic value, and global politics and
culture are continuously changing, questions of affect and disaffection may also be continuously
changing. Thus, the exact political impact of multilinguistic memes cannot yet be determined
with certainty.

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121
CONCLUSIONS
This project set out to unpack the role of multilinguistic memes in broader dynamics of
cultural flows and global politics. While I was in the process of collecting and analyzing my
data, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. As it escalated, so did the limitations to my research
procedures. Paradoxically, however, the research limitations posed by health risks and
restrictions on travel and in-person gatherings revealed in increasing clarity the role of digital
culture in global politics that this dissertation aims to understand. People took to social media to
comment on the relentlessness of 2020, even as it was coming to a close (see following
memes)—they expressed criticism of governments’ responses, talked about activities they have
missed, and described the difficult decisions they had to make. In this global crisis event, the
social media response (especially in meme culture) also revealed the inadequacy of biological
analogies such as the gene–meme analogy used by Dawkins (2006) for understanding digital
culture. Whereas Dawkins’s meme–gene analogy sees people as hosts of ideas that leap from
brain to brain like a virus, the varied response to the COVID-19 pandemic made it clear that even
a literal virus is not neutral or apolitical and that the hosts of the virus also have agency in how it
spreads and its associated meanings. Similarly, with internet memes and digital culture in
general, this dissertation has shown the importance of unpacking the social, political, historical,
and global aspects of its context for understanding digital culture.

122

-When 2020 only has three months left
2020: Oh, no, we’re not done yet.

-The government’s decisions about lockdown
-I don’t know shit about fuck.

123

-Me when clubs reopen
-Dude, my song

-Why am I here again and not at the coffeeshop with my friends?
-Oh, right … because I decided not to get vaccinated

As an intellectual project, this study also speaks to a broader phenomenon of language
mixing that extends beyond memes and the internet. There is a larger trend in global cultural
production wherein language mixing is becoming a new norm. This is evident in music lyrics,
graffiti, and other art forms on and off the internet. By taking memes as one example, this project
124
contributes to this larger conversation on how hybridity itself is becoming a language.
Multilinguistic meme makers said that language mixing and culture mixing is more authentic to
who they are and the way the speak. In line with the work of Canclini (1995) and Kraidy (2005),
this dissertation complicates the view of cultural hybridity beyond the dichotomy of resistance–
domination. I show how cultural hybridity in multilinguistic memes can, in fact, do both
simultaneously. The global meme elite mixes cultures to create a much-needed safe space to
resist domination, but its members also thus, maintain their own elite class status and reach for
more capital rather than resisting the entirety of the global capitalist system.
Studying the underresearched category of multilinguistic memes changes how we
understand internet memes in general by further connecting them with broader historical and
political aspects of culture. My dissertation demonstrates how internet memes are neither
transitory nor born in a vacuum. Rather, it shows that memes are contextual and creating memes
is a practice that speaks to history, politics, and culture on and off the internet. Meme makers
build on past memes, popular culture, and cultural objects, making and circulating memes to
catalogue their own voices in the meme archive. Thus, this project contributes to a view of
memes as part of a larger conversation around cultural flows and politics.
Moreover, this dissertation contributes a structure for studying digital content through a
critical transnational framework, proposing to conduct global research that is noncomparative,
that does not separate content by nation-state or linguistic groups but rather examines content
holistically while taking into account its context. Using this framework, I investigated digital
content at four levels: global, public, historical and archival, and personal and affective. Whereas
the global level analyzes the content in broad dynamics of global power structures and cultural
flows, the public level looks at it in the smaller group or community in which it is created and
125
circulated. The historical level examines how the content converses with history or incorporates
archival practices. Finally, the personal level considers the affect communicated through the
content, the work of said affect, and how it relates to the broader dynamics in which the content
and its creators operate. Digital media is seen as a setting in which meaning is made and debated.
Thus, memes are not void of meaning. In fact, researching multilinguistic memes reveals the role
that digital culture plays in disrupting and simultaneously reinforcing oppressive cultural power
dynamics. In this way, this dissertation pushes for a view beyond the framework of technological
determinism and looks instead at what takes place in the grey areas between tech optimism and
tech pessimism. It is premised on the idea that by understanding the complexity of how digital
culture can operate both in oppressive and so-called liberative ways, scholars, media creators,
and practitioners can be better equipped to make nuanced decisions about their work going
forward. In other words, understanding that the same memes that connect us and make us laugh
can also reassert the dominance of one culture over another or reinforce racist and sexist power
dynamics might make us reconsider the view that technology will liberate and democratize the
world. At the same time, seeing how the untranslatable has allowed multilinguistic meme makers
to have conversations that go under the radar and gives them much needed privacy and safety
might raise questions for tech pessimists about their own doubts regarding the role of technology
in helping create space for people who might not otherwise have it in their everyday life. This
complex view is something I have incorporated in my teaching on internet culture, and it has
proven to have an impact on how students view themselves and their participation in internet
culture. Thus, understanding the complex nuances of power dynamics in internet culture can also
increase the accountability of participants regarding the content that they make and help
circulate.
126
By combining interviews with analysis of meme content, this dissertation reaffirmed the
value of multimodal analysis when it comes to studying digital culture. Involving meme makers
in the analysis of their creative content helps explicate that content because it gives meme
makers the chance to comment on the context and meaning-making process behind their memes.
As the researcher in this project, I had the opportunity to understand meme makers’ priorities
when they make their decisions and get to know their considerations. This also served to create a
more participatory method wherein multilinguistic meme makers could be involved in my
analysis and interpretations, which made the process more ethical and the analysis more
accurate.
I found that multilinguistic meme making and sharing connects a community, the global
meme elite, which has a complex standing when it comes to class, race, and gender in global
cultural power dynamics. The global meme elite enjoys access to the capital afforded by
globalization, including things like international education or travel, but still shares experiences
of those at the bottom of the global caste system, like being vetted at borders and facing
discrimination. In making and sharing multilinguistic memes, the global meme elite centers the
untranslatable and forms an untranslatable public. This public uses the untranslatable as a
discursive and creative practice to exercise members’ mobility, to roam between disparate
publics, and to participate in the conversations that it deems relevant. To do so, its members
build and borrow from meme libraries, and they speak to meme trends by inserting historical and
traditional cultural elements. Thus, they turn memes into digital cultural artifacts that go beyond
ephemera and intervene in the direction of global cultural flows. Although Western (primarily
U.S.) culture still dominates much of the multilinguistic meme content (be it through the
presence of the English language or U.S. popular culture), multilinguistic meme makers partially
127
disrupt that dominance by not speaking directly to the West or approaching it as a superior
culture. Looking more closely at the sense of humor and affect, what I call the zanaakha, of
multilinguistic memes reveals a cycle of irritation whereby the global meme elite, irritated by its
limited access to the cultural capital promised by globalization, further produces irritation in its
memes. This irritation works as a call or reach for capital while also providing social, cultural,
and political critique.
Regarding global cultural flows, this dissertation helps us understand the nuanced power
dynamic wherein Western (primarily U.S.) culture still dominates in flows, but not necessarily in
meaning making. Although much of the content used in multilinguistic memes comes from the
United States, including Hollywood movies, TV shows, music, and even meme templates, how
this content is used does not necessarily reflect its original (Western and monolinguistic) format.
Multilinguistic memes, in other words, do not speak to the West, but rather use this content to
have an internal conversation. Although multilinguistic memes reflect and reinforce existing
characteristics of global cultural flows (namely, maintaining to a certain extent the dominance of
U.S. culture and politics), they also serve as a space to critique, imagine, and create alternatives.
In this way, this work also contributes by complicating the binary of local and global.
First, by focusing on languages, these memes are not geographically bound to separated
countries or locales; thus, the term local never seemed to fit unless called for by the context.
Moreover, the very idea of “global” is contested by both the asymmetry of global cultural flows
and in the use of the content—meaning that global does not account for the overrepresentation of
one culture over others, nor does it account for how multilinguistic meme makers use content
from different cultures to have an internal conversation. The directions in which cultures flow
may not have shown drastic changes from the dominant course (i.e., the United States still
128
dominates), but what happens when they “land” is different, and that is the focus of this study.
Despite consuming and using it in their memes, multilinguistic meme makers put U.S. culture at
a lower level in terms of cultural capital than the dominance that it represents.
Although this work is presentist in the fact that it focuses on multilinguistic memes,
current topics, and a quick-changing digital culture, it has implications for future research on
memes and other fields. It puts research on digital media into conversation with cultural studies,
language, and politics and thus, advances interdisciplinarity in the field of communication. It
allows us to learn about the role that memes play in communication of globalized digital culture
and about the power of languages and language mixing in digital culture. It opens the door for
examining topics related to pedagogy and education, including critical media literacy and the use
of digital culture to advance nonoppressive power dynamics. A critical literacy of memes may
have implications for digital culture itself, if youth who create memes learn about the power
dynamics in which internet memes are imbricated. Media creators and practitioners may also
benefit from this literacy, whether they create internet memes or produce work about them.
Moreover, it raises new questions for scholarly research. Throughout this work, in both
the interviews I conducted and the observations I made while I developed this project, it became
evident that platform politics play a crucial role in cultural flows and global politics. To return to
the COVID-19 example, when misinformation spread around the disease, platforms such as
Instagram incorporated a fact-checking capability, flagged misinformation, and pointed their
users to official sources for accurate information. However, my interviewees stated that they did
not feel protected by internet platforms. These platforms like Google and Facebook are also
increasingly involved in state politics in countries around the world. These are indicators of how
social media platforms not only are imbricated in cultural flows and global politics, but also that
129
they have unequal and unsymmetrical impacts on different people depending on race and
ethnicity, class, gender, and their own relationship with the state in question. Thus, putting
research on multilinguistic memes in conversation with works by scholars like Tarleton Gillespie
(2010), Sarah Roberts (2019), and Safiya Noble (2018), among, others can help reveal how
social media platforms participate in reinforcing or disrupting transnational power dynamics and
global cultural flows. It can also further contribute to a nuanced view of technology’s use as both
an oppressive and liberative tool simultaneously.
Another area of interest in meme research itself is a deeper investigation of what I call
“meme economics”—how capital value (whether monetary or cultural) is assigned to memes.
Although this work touches on meme economics briefly in Chapter Four, this is still a
developing field. Nissenbaum and Shifman (2017) have looked at the cultural capital in memes
on 4chan. We are also beginning to see memes being monetized through cryptocurrencies like
Dogecoin or meme images being sold like Zoë Roth, who sold her “Disaster Girl” meme as a
nonfungible token for $500,000 (BBC, 2021). Understanding how memes acquire value, which
memes have what kind of capital, and the political implications of meme values would help us
further understand the transnational power dynamics in which digital culture is involved.
Another budding area in meme research relates to affect theory and materiality,
particularly meme textures. In Chapter Three, I touch on meme textures in my discussion of
r/DeepFriedMemes, r/SauteedMemes, and r/MemeRestoration. Due to the scope of this work,
meme textures and affect are not put into conversation here, but it would be interesting to
explore the relationship between the affect and materiality of memes. This could help answer
questions about how textures and affect relate to humor and politics. Interestingly, the subreddit
r/DeepFriedMemes closed because that aesthetic and humor was largely coopted by meme
130
makers seeking to advance alt-right ideologies. Thus, a deeper investigation of the relationship
among materiality, affect, humor, and politics in internet memes could help us better understand
such occurrences and subcultures. During the last few years, there have been increasing instances
in which the same practices associated with meme culture and creative digital cultural practices
were also used to spread harmful racist and sexist messages or disinformation and
misinformation. It is imperative for scholars to further investigate how these same tools are used
for different ends to better understand how to create a healthier internet culture.
Furthermore, although this study found that incorporating so-called Western culture, or
culture from the Global North, did not necessarily mean it dominated meaning-making
processes, it would be interesting to look into cultural exchanges among cultures of the Global
South. Previous studies, for example, have considered K-pop fandom and creative digital media
content in the Middle East, but global-scale studies that focus solely on South-to-South culture
mixing is lacking. Investigating these types of South-to-South culture-mixing practices can
further illuminate the dynamics involved of global cultural flows that look past (or perhaps even
ignore) the Global North.
Last, this study did not focus on a self-identified social movement. The multilinguistic
memes I analyze here are not classified as activism memes. In fact, several meme makers I
interviewed (although not all) said they do not see themselves as political, nor do they not talk
about politics. This is similar to Jenkins and Shresthova’s (2016) discussion of representatives
from many of their case study organizations who declined to identify with terms such as
“activist” or “political.” This refusal served as a way for participants to engage in civic activities
(which the authors label “participatory politics”) on their own terms (Jenkins & Shresthova,
2016). This study focuses on politics and civic participation in a broad sense. In this way, it
131
broadens the definition of civics to include discursive and playful or creative practices of internet
culture. I use this broad understanding of civics to account for how our everyday or ordinary
practices—like where we shop, how we cook, and whom we follow and unfollow online—are in
fact, political practices. It is this broad understanding that helps explain the nuanced workings of
online civic engagement—namely, how it can simultaneously promote certain progressive values
and even, as this work shows, potentially push toward disrupting oppressive culture; stay in
privileged circles and have limited reach; and reinforce existing oppressive dynamics and deepen
existing divides between communities. A critical transnational approach to internet culture
focuses on points of convergence between cultures rather than comparing the differences, and it
puts the opportunities for creative online civic engagement in conversation with its risks or
pitfalls. This depth of understanding can serve as a generative space for imagination,
experimentation, and carving out of solutions for global problems.

132
References
BBC. (2021, April 30). Zoë Roth sells ‘Disaster Girl’ meme as NFT for $500,000. BBC News.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56948514
Canclini, N. G. (1990). Hybrid cultures: Strategies for entering and leaving modernity.
University of Minnesota Press.
Dawkins, R. (2006). The selfish gene. Oxford University Press.
Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms.’ New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364.
Jenkins, H., & Shresthova, S. (2016). “It’s called giving a shit!”: What counts as “politics”? In
H. Jenkins, S. Shresthova, L. Gamber-Thompson, N. Kliger-Vilenchik, & A. M.
Zimmerman (Eds.), By any media necessary: The new youth activism (pp. 253–289).
NYU Press.
Kraidy, M. M. (2005). Hybridity, or the cultural logic of globalization. Temple University Press.
Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of
4chan’s /b/ board. New Media & Society, 19(4), 483–501.
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU
Press.
Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media.
Yale University Press.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Crossing linguistic and cultural boundaries, multilinguistic memes reflect the dialogue between cultures under globalization. Thus far, research on memes has addressed countries separately, neglecting a common genre of memes that are multilingual and multicultural, and missing the power struggles at play in intercultural relationships. This dissertation examines the role culture-mixing and Internet memes play in global cultural flows and power dynamics. It is based on an analysis of multilinguistic memes, including memes in Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish, French, and English, and interviews with multilinguistic meme makers. Drawing upon global histories of conflict, colonization, and migration to explore power relations at the intersection of culture, technology, and politics, it speaks to the expanding field of digital media studies that presents a complex view of the Internet beyond its dichotomous depiction either as an equalizing or oppressive means of communication. ❧ It finds that multilinguistic meme making and sharing connects a community, the global meme elite, which has a complex standing when it comes to class, race, and gender in global cultural power dynamics. The global meme elite enjoys access to the capital afforded by globalization including things like international education or travel, but still share experiences of those at the bottom of the global caste system, like being vetted at borders and facing discrimination. In making and sharing multilinguistic memes, the global meme elite centers around the Untranslatable and forms an Untranslatable public. This public uses the Untranslatable as a discursive and creative practice to exercise members’ mobility, to roam between disparate publics, and to participate in the conversations that they deem relevant to them. To do so, they build and borrow from meme libraries, they speak to meme trends by inserting historical and traditional cultural elements to them. Thus, they turn memes into digital cultural artifacts that go beyond ephemera, and intervene in the direction of global cultural flows. While Western (primarily U.S.) culture still dominates much of the multilinguistic meme content (be it through the presence of the English language or U.S. popular culture), multilinguistic meme makers partially disrupt that dominance by not speaking directly to the West or approaching it as superior culture. Looking more closely at the sense of humor and affect, what I call the zanaakha, of multilinguistic memes revealed a cycle of irritation, whereby the global meme elite, irritated by its limited access to the cultural capital promised by globalization, further produces irritation in their memes. This irritation works as a call or reach for capital, while also providing social, cultural, and political critique.

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Creator Zidani, Sulafa (author)

Core Title Trendy or transformative? How the global meme elite creates social change in the multilingual internet

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School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Degree Conferral Date 2021-08

Publication Date 08/05/2023

Defense Date 05/26/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag culture mixing,digital media,global communication,internet culture,memes,OAI-PMH Harvest

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Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Kun, Josh (committee chair), Kraidy, Marwan (committee member)

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