Memes as reasonably hostile laments: A discourse analysis of political dissent in Oman

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how political dissent is linguistically constructed and mitigated in memes that are circulated nationally on WhatsApp in Oman. I do so by drawing upon insights from relational approaches to face, the theorization of communicative strategies as polysemous and ambiguous, and research pertaining to the Islamic practice of lamenting. The data consist of a representative set of memes collected in the summer and fall of 2015 as part of an ethnographic project on social media and Arab identity. I theorize memes as cultural tools that take the form of 'reasonably hostile' lament-narratives, which enable citizens in Oman to engage in democracy while saving face. To create lament-memes that voice dissent while mitigating face-attacks, Omanis draw upon various communicative strategies: They use repetition, code choice, hashtags, and different genres; they juxtapose emojis with text; and they manipulate the production and participation frameworks of texts. Collectively, these strategies, which function via intertextuality, allow the concerns to be aired, but indirectly and playfully. The article demonstrates how political dissent is negotiated and mitigated through memes, the agency of social media users, and the validity of conceptualizing memes as cultural tools.

Society in digital contexts: New modes of identity and community construction

“…Citizens simultaneously localize a global semiotic resource and globalize a local issue (i.e. government corruption), thereby constructing a new 'hybrid' identity: A placid Omani dissident that the Omani government is heeded to notice (see Al Zidjaly 2017). An additional example involves my documenting of complex identity work by an online community of anonymous former or "ex-" Muslims on Arabic Twitter (note that for political and religious reasons the identity of ex-Muslims cannot for the time being exist outside of social media).…”

Divine impoliteness: How Arabs negotiate Islamic moral order on Twitter

“…Within Arabic Islamic contexts, technology is found at the center of social and religious activism. Examples include Omanis' use of cassette tapes to disseminate religious sermons to the masses in the 1980s (Eickelman 1989), young women's use of mobile technology in the Arabian Gulf to challenge Arab gender norms in the 1990s (Al Zidjaly and Gordon 2012), Arabs's Habermasian digital religious and political debates in the 2000s (Eickleman and Anderson 2003), and their appropriation of Yahoo chatrooms and the WhatsApp chatting messenger to revisit sociocultural concerns and reconstruct Arab identity from the bottom up (Al Zidjaly 2010Zidjaly , 2014Zidjaly , 2017a. Across these examples and platforms, Arabs have continually, creatively, and surreptitiously used emerging technologies to circumvent their society's limits on free expression and enact political and social activism (KhosraviNik and Sarkhoh 2017;Nordenson 2018;Sinatora 2019aSinatora , 2019bSumiala and Korpiola 2017;Zayani 2018).…”

“This is similar to Vincent Chin”: Intertextuality, referring expressions, and the discursive construction of Asian American activist identities in an online messaging community

“…Similarly, Al Zidjaly (2017) examines how memes circulated nationally among WhatsApp users in Oman enacted political dissent, highlighting the memes as tools used to create “reasonably hostile lament-narratives” (p. 573) that express dissent while also saving cultural face. She shows how users used the memes to launch complaints against government officials in a lighthearted and indirect manner, and how users employed a variety of linguistic strategies such as repetition, hashtags, and emojis to mitigate direct face-attacks towards the Omani government, thereby constructing calls to action and maintaining political agency.…”