Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1
Return to Contents»
The Locations of Stardom / Lisa Patti and Stanka Radović
<1> Since the publication of Richard Dyer‘s Stars several decades ago, the academic study of stardom has become a dynamic area of analysis within media studies, with several recent developments in celebrity studies – now a distinct scholarly field – establishing a discursive framework for this special issue of Reconstruction. For example, the spring 2010 special issue of the journal The Velvet Light Trap (no. 65), Celebrity!, provided an occasion to showcase theoretical developments in the field, including Barry King‘s Marxist analysis of the circulation of the celebrity as a transnational brand in “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form,” and to analyze recent events in celebrity culture through a series of brief “snapshots.” The recently introduced Routledge journal Celebrity Studies captures the spirit of that special issue by not only documenting and challenging the development of celebrity studies as a field (in all of its disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations) but also inviting scholars to contribute “timely, provocative and open-ended short pieces on current topics in celebrity studies,” seeking to produce a vibrant discourse that attends to the emerging events and trends in celebrity culture. The most recent addition to this surge of scholarship on celebrity culture within academic journals is the October 2011 issue of the PMLA (Vol. 126, No. 4) devoted to the special topic “Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety.” The issue features both a series of theoretical reflections from established voices within celebrity studies (including Joshua Gamson, Leo Braudy, and Marjorie Garber) and articles that examine stardom through a diverse range of textual encounters, from Oscar Wilde‘s Salome to Audrey Tautou‘s face. In this special issue, we seek to build on these recent contributions to celebrity studies by exploring the cultural, political, and institutional significance of stardom in relation to location, expanding on what King termed the “poetics of marketability” to examine the poetics of circulation produced by celebrity culture.
<2> Many of the essays in this special issue cite King‘s essay as a point of theoretical contact, pursuing within their arguments not only the specific claims he makes about the celebrity as an expression of “the money form” but also the emphasis on both the visibility and the circulation of celebrity that penetrates his discussion. The distinction between stars and celebrities that informs his analysis – and much recent work in star studies – fades in some of the articles gathered in this issue in favor of an emphasis on the geographies of celebrity. While, as King has shown, stardom and celebrity define distinct forms of fame, this special issue considers the ways in which both stardom and celebrity have been defined by the industrial, political, and cultural expansions of celebrity culture and the routes that individual star images have traveled as a result of those expansions. We suggest that the “location” of stardom is often conceived in or as circulation, and we seek to foreground the resonance of stardom‘s circulation with the forms of analysis that King‘s economic framework enables. In order to emphasize the interplay between circulation and location, we have included essays that discuss transnational star images as well as essays that discuss star images that resist the flexible global itineraries presumed by a transnational celebrity culture and remain bound to specific textual forms and local zones of reception. Rather than focusing exclusively on transnational stardom or on specific national star cultures or on niche sites of star circulation, this special issue brings into dialogue reflections on stars with very different itineraries. It is difficult to reconcile these itineraries into a stable theoretical framework that would account for the circulation of stars in and across different local, national, and global communities. Instead, we would like to invite readers to reflect on the limits imposed on the circulation of specific star images in comparison with the unrestrained global circulation of stardom. Finally, the essays selected for this special issue reflect on the limits of star “location” by juxtaposing the inevitable groundedness of the star-as-person to the dislocated and often unbound circulation of the star-as-image. This unresolved tension between the star‘s actual life and identity and his/her imagined role in the transnational circulation of star images puts further pressure on the notion of location, raising important questions about the limitations and illusions, but also unforeseen possibilities, of the flexible global geographies of stardom and their political implications.
<3> In “‘From S.A. to L.A.‘: Branding Transport and Circulating Celebrity in South Africa‘s Nonhle Goes to Hollywood,” Brandeise Monk-Payton foregrounds the notion of a “poetics of translatability” (building on King‘s “poetics of marketability”) in order to examine the contours of South African celebrity culture and its engagement with Hollywood. The essay focuses on South African celebrity Nonhle Thema‘s attempt to extend the geographical scope of her star image through the repackaging of the “celebreality” genre of reality television but without relying on clichéd arguments about celebrity, television, or transnationalism. In her discussion of Thema‘s stardom, Monk-Payton charts the way stars navigate transmedia itineraries across global markets while remaining strongly bound to local zones of reception.
<4> Michele Byers‘ essay “On the (Im)possibility of Canadian Celebrity” continues this reflection on the specificity of national star identity in the global media market by looking at the distinctiveness of Canadian celebrity, analyzing its “white keying” and ordinariness as particular indices of star identification. Her essay offers an account of the ways in which racialized constructions of Canadian national identity shape star images in transit between Canada and Hollywood, setting in motion a provocative set of questions about the nature of national identity in relation to stardom and celebrity. Since Canadian stars tend to be inherently dislocated because their very emergence requires them to be in circulation beyond their national border, Byers questions the dependence of global stardom on one specific location where this status is continually bestowed and confirmed, namely Hollywood.
<5> By drawing on postcolonial discourses on race and Orientalism, Gloria Shin‘s “‘If it be Love Indeed, Tell Me How Much‘: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and White Pleasure After Empire” theorizes Elizabeth Taylor‘s and Richard Burton‘s star images in the wake of Cleopatra, arguing that the explosive amorous pair function as spectacularized subjects whose romantic entanglements, on and off screen, represent and promote the notion of imperial desire. The loss of white power after colonialism is persistently reconfigured through Taylor and Burton‘s heterosexual romance, extravagant consumption, and their cinematic personae, which are often based on historical imperial figures. In the emerging postcolonial world, Taylor and Burton‘s mediatic passion allows for the re-imagining of a new white subjectivity predicated on the continuous pursuit of pleasure and an implicit flight from “blackness.”
<6> In “The Subversion of Abstract Space in U2‘s Rhizomatic 1990s,” Anthony Cristofani proposes an engagement with the “locations of stardom” by examining the star‘s performative potential for creating subversive rhizomatic space. Focusing on the celebrity status of Bono Vox and U2, Cristofani examines the rock star‘s tactical resistance to the homogenizing and neutralizing political implications of global stardom. From the alter egos that Bono assumes to the deliberate architecture of the concert space and its proliferation of television screens, this article‘s innovative attention to the rock concert as an event provides a challenge to the notion of stardom as a series of disembodied and politically tame iterations of the status-quo.
<7> Lisa Patti‘s “White Weddings: New Media Archives and the Transformations of Michael Jackson‘s Thriller” examines the fan reenactments of Jackson‘s Thriller video with a particular emphasis on the online circulation of wedding videos featuring white brides and grooms and their attendants staging flash mob-style tributes to the Thriller zombie dance. Analyzing the wedding as an event and the viral success of these videos through YouTube, this article considers the consequences of the erasure of Jackson‘s racial and sexual indeterminacy in Thriller through the performance of the zombie dance as an element of a white heterosexual ritual and Jackson‘s recuperation of that indeterminacy through the remake of Thriller he produced for exhibition during the concert tour preparations documented in the posthumously released film This is It.
<8>Stanka Radović‘s “Buried Stars in Salman Rushdie‘s The Ground Beneath Her Feet” examines Rushdie‘s status as a global literary star and the death threat by which this status is produced. By reading Rushdie‘s only novel dedicated to stardom alongside his various essays and interviews on celebrity culture, Radović argues that, following the infamous fatwa of 1989, Rushdie self-consciously explores the interstitial status of the star and the exilic notoriety that serves to establish the fixed location of his/her audiences. The dangerous overlap between real life events involving the star as an actual person and the disembodied images of stardom in its boundless transmedia circulation underscore the global “outsideness” of stars and their function as contrapuntal affirmations of their spectators‘ inflexible rootedness.
<9> Michael Mirabile in “Transnational Oswald: Relocating DeLillo‘s Libra” continues this reflection on the spectators‘ role in the formation of stardom by emphasizing the interplay between the constructions of national identity, race and geo-cultural spaces by which the binaries of identification are challenged and reconfigured in the process of circulation through media. DeLillo's account of Oswald's life continuously oscillates between a space of fame or notoriety and one of ordinariness or obscurity (and back again), predicated in part on the positioning of a (real and imagined) observing crowd. Of particular resonance is Mirabile‘s emphasis on the unresolved tension between transnational geography and its “blank space” of notoriety, kept in precarious balance in the appropriately named Libra.
<10> By mapping the circulation of stardom across intersecting local, national, and global grids of intelligibility, the essays in this issue assert a new set of theoretical coordinates for celebrity studies, suggesting that the analytical framework of a global market for stardom must remain attentive to the local and national networks that bind many star images. By bringing together a series of articles that challenge assumptions about transnational stardom and examine a wide range of media texts – including novels, biographies, films, television shows, and rock concerts – that track distinct global sites – from Canada to South Africa – “The Locations of Stardom” seeks to expand and unsettle the geographical, textual, and disciplinary locations of celebrity studies.
Return to Top»