Celebrity Colonialism

Celebrity Colonialism
Author: Robert Clarke
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2020-06-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527554759

Celebrity Colonialism brings together studies on an array of personalities, movements and events from the colonial era to the present, and explores the intersection of discourses, formations and institutions that condition celebrity in colonial and postcolonial cultures. Across nineteen chapters, it examines the entanglements of fame and power fame in colonial and postcolonial settings. Each chapter demonstrates the sometimes highly ambivalent roles played by famous personalities as endorsements and apologists for, antagonists and challengers of, colonial, imperial and postcolonial institutions and practices. And each in their way provides an insight into the complex set of meanings implied by novel term “celebrity colonialism.” The contributions to this collection demonstrate that celebrity provides a powerful lens for examining the nexus of discourses, institutions and practices associated with the dynamics of appropriation, domination, resistance and reconciliation that characterize colonial and postcolonial cultural politics. Taken together the contributions to Celebrity Colonialism argue that the examination of celebrity promises to enrich our understanding of what colonialism was and, more significantly, what it has become.

Indigenous Celebrity

Indigenous Celebrity
Author: Jennifer Adese
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-04-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0887559220

Indigenous Celebrity speaks to the possibilities, challenges, and consequences of popular forms of recognition, critically recasting the lens through which we understand Indigenous people’s entanglements with celebrity. It presents a wide range of essays that explore the theoretical, material, social, cultural, and political impacts of celebrity on and for Indigenous people. It questions and critiques the whitestream concept of celebrity and the very juxtaposition of “Indigenous” and “celebrity” and casts a critical lens on celebrity culture’s impact on Indigenous people. Indigenous people who willingly engage with celebrity culture, or are drawn up into it, enter into a complex terrain of social relations informed by layered dimensions of colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia, and classism. Yet this reductive framing of celebrity does not account for the ways that Indigenous people’s own worldviews inform Indigenous engagement with celebrity culture––or rather, popular social and cultural forms of recognition. Indigenous Celebrity reorients conversations on Indigenous celebrity towards understanding how Indigenous people draw from nation-specific processes of respect and recognition while at the same time navigating external assumptions and expectations. This collection examines the relationship of Indigenous people to the concept of celebrity in past, present, and ongoing contexts, identifying commonalities, tensions, and possibilities.

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism
Author: Fiona Paisley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 113627460X

This collection brings much-needed focus to the vibrancy and vitality of minority and marginal writing about empire, and to their implications as expressions of embodied contact between imperial power and those negotiating its consequences from "below." The chapters explore how less powerful and less privileged actors in metropolitan and colonial societies within the British Empire have made use of the written word and of the power of speech, public performance, and street politics. This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the "imperial archive" that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

Celebrity Diplomacy

Celebrity Diplomacy
Author: Andrew F. Cooper
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317262700

Time magazine named Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates their "Persons of the Year." The United Nations tapped Angelina Jolie as a goodwill ambassador. Bob Geldof organized the Live8 concert to push the G8 leaders' summit on AIDS and debt relief. What has come to be called "celebrity diplomacy" attracts wide media attention, significant money, and top official access around the world. But is this phenomenon just the latest fad? Are celebrities dabbling in an arena that is out of their depth, or are they bringing justified notice to important problems that might otherwise languish on the crowded international diplomatic scene? This book is the first to examine celebrity diplomacy as a serious global project with important implications, both positive and negative. Intended for readers who might not normally read about celebrities, it will also attract audiences often turned off by international affairs. Celebrities bring optimism and "buzz" to issues that seem deep and gloomy. Even if their lofty goals remain elusive, when celebrities speak, other actors in the global system listen.

Celebrity Humanitarianism

Celebrity Humanitarianism
Author: Ilan Kapoor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2013
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0415783380

This book examines the new phenomenon of celebrity humanitarianism arguing that legitimates neoliberal capitalism and global inequality.

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture

Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture
Author: Anthea Taylor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 042977298X

This intellectually vibrant volume is the first collection to deal with Australian celebrity in ways that account for both cultural and gendered specificities, demonstrating how gendered ways of imagining Australia are reinforced and contested in celebrity representations and self-presentations. Gender and Australian Celebrity Culture engages with celebrities across a diverse range of fields – actors, journalists, athletes, comedians, writers, and television personalities – and in doing so critically reflects upon different forms of Australian fame and the media platforms and practices that sustain them. Authors in this volume engage directly with pertinent issues relating to gender and sexuality, including celebrity feminism and the generative capacity of feminist rage; normative femininity and its instability; hegemonic masculinities; and queerness and its (in)visibility. Contributors also intervene in a number of ongoing debates in media and cultural studies more broadly, including those around the politics and affordances of digital media; whiteness and Australia’s colonial histories; celebrity labour; and methodologies for celebrity studies. This timely collection urges scholars of celebrity to attend further both to the gendered nature of celebrity culture and to local conditions of production and consumption. This book will be of key interest to researchers and graduate students in cultural studies, television and film studies, digital media studies, critical race and whiteness studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary studies.

Batman Saves the Congo

Batman Saves the Congo
Author: Alexandra Cosima Budabin
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-06-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1452961131

How celebrity strategic partnerships are disrupting humanitarian space Can a celebrity be a “disrupter,” promoting strategic partnerships to bring new ideas and funding to revitalize the development field—or are celebrities just charismatic ambassadors for big business? Examining the role of the rich and famous in development and humanitarianism, Batman Saves the Congo argues that celebrities do both, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development. In 2010, entertainer Ben Affleck, known for his superhero performance as Batman, launched the Eastern Congo Initiative to bring a new approach to the region’s development. This case study is central to Batman Saves the Congo. Affleck’s organization operates with special access, diversified funding, and significant support of elites within political, philanthropic, development, and humanitarian circuits. This sets it apart from other development organizations. With his convening power, Affleck has built partnerships with those inside and outside development, staking bipartisan political ground that is neither charity nor aid but “good business.” Such visible and recognizable celebrity humanitarians are occupying the public domain yet not engaging meaningfully with any public, argues Batman Saves the Congo. They are an unruly bunch of new players in development who amplify business solutions. As elite political participants, celebrities shape development practices through strategic partnerships that are both an innovative way to raise awareness and funding for neglected causes and a troubling trend of unaccountable elite leadership in North–South relations. Batman Saves the Congo helps illuminate the power of celebritized business solutions and the development contexts they create.

Blasian Invasion

Blasian Invasion
Author: Myra S. Washington
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2017-10-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496814231

Myra S. Washington probes the social construction of race through the mixed-race identity of Blasians, people of Black and Asian ancestry. She looks at the construction of the identifier Blasian and how this term went from being undefined to forming a significant role in popular media. Today Blasian has emerged as not just an identity Black/Asian mixed-race people can claim, but also a popular brand within the industry and a signifier in the culture at large. Washington tracks the transformation of Blasian from being an unmentioned category to a recognized status applied to other Blasian figures in media. Blasians have been neglected as a meaningful category of people in research, despite an extensive history of Black and Asian interactions within the United States and abroad. Washington explains that even though Americans have mixed in every way possible, racial mixing is framed in certain ways, which almost always seem to involve Whiteness. Unsurprisingly, media discourses about Blasians mostly conform to usual scripts already created, reproduced, and familiar to audiences about monoracial Blacks and Asians. In the first book on this subject, Washington regards Blasians as belonging to more than one community, given their multiple histories and experiences. Moving beyond dominant rhetoric, she does not harp on defining or categorizing mixed race, but instead recognizes the multiplicities of Blasians and the process by which they obtain meaning. Washington uses celebrities, including Kimora Lee, Dwayne Johnson, Hines Ward, and Tiger Woods, to highlight how they challenge and destabilize current racial debate, create spaces for themselves, and change the narratives that frame multiracial people. Finally, Washington asserts Blasians as evidence not only for the fluidity of identities, but also for the limitations of reductive racial binaries.

Time and Social Theory

Time and Social Theory
Author: Barbara Adam
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745669395

Time is at the forefront of contemporary scholarly inquiry across the natural sciences and the humanities. Yet the social sciences have remained substantially isolated from time-related concerns. This book argues that time should be a key part of social theory and focuses concern upon issues which have emerged as central to an understanding of today's social world. Through her analysis of time Barbara Adam shows that our contemporary social theories are firmly embedded in Newtonian science and classical dualistic philosophy. She exposes these classical frameworks of thought as inadequate to the task of conceptualizing our contemporary world of standardized time, computers, nuclear power and global telecommunications.