“Am I Your Coequal?!”: Memes and Changing Meanings in the Digital Subversion of Ghanaian Hierarchies

Abstract

Capturing the zeitgeist of youthful challenges to the status quo in Ghana, a video of an anonymous young person challenging an older politician with a derisive call of “Tweaa!” went viral in 2014. Reentextualizations of the encounter were soon circulating online in the form of memes, songs, and hashtags and offline in joking exchanges everywhere from vegetable markets to parliament. This article traces the many ironic reembeddings of the tweaa clip across these contexts, as young people used tweaa to subvert and interrogate Ghana’s rigid social hierarchies—ultimately producing an enduring shift in the vocabulary of protest in Ghana. Tweaa, once a casual interjection of disapproval, is now explicitly seen as iconic of the disenfranchised challenging those in power: a verb meaning “to protest inept authority.” This case study of memetic circulation suggests that memes not only discursively produce publics but can effect seismic semiotic shifts in everyday language.

Social Movements, Power, and Mediated Visibility

“…Although I focus mainly on research that covers our media environment since the ubiquitous use of social media in the age of smartphones (post-2009), we must place this era within the broader context to which media theorist Wendy Chun points us: the ways in which the computer and Internet technology are the technologies of the neoliberal era. Overarching nearly all research on the topics reviewed for this article are the myriad ways in which our digitized spheres create and reinforce neoliberalism as an everyday practice (Besteman & Gusterson 2019;Crawford 2021;Chun 2013Chun , 2017Chun , 2021Fernandes 2017; Srnicek 2016). Chun's work demonstrates how the computer and the Internet are the technologies of neoliberalism, much like how counting and statistics were the technologies of industrial capitalism and colonialism at the turn of the twentieth century (Merry 2019).…”