The Meme Event: How the Biafran Online Community Transforms Trauma into Digital Memorial Practice

Abstract

This study investigates how Biafran digital commemorative practices transform inherited trauma into coordinated, time-specific memorial action on social media. Specifically, the study’s objective is to develop and apply the meme event as a mid-level analytical framework for explaining how recognizable memetic content, networked community practice, and strategic temporality converge to make memory publicly actionable. Drawing on a corpus of 20 meme items and non-meme commemorative posts circulated on Facebook and Instagram around Biafra Commemoration Day on May 30th, the study identifies four overlapping but analytically distinct memorial functions: creating virtual sacred space, bridging past and present, performing testimony and witnessing, and staging defiant survival. These practices activate inherited memories through coordinated digital performances that connect historical loss to contemporary identity, collective witnessing, and future-oriented claims of survival. The study argues that the reincarnation discourse evident in these practices provides a distinct form of postmemory in which the relationship between the later generations and war-dead is not only inherited psychological or cultural memory, but also an embodied and ontological continuity. This framework foregrounds the eventfulness of memes, shifting attention from the meme as object to the communal practices through which memetic forms become memorial and political action.