Global Politics of Celebrity

In the age of networked publics and global viral publicity, celebrity is transnational. Its circulation illuminates global, national, and local dynamics of power and resistance. Celebrity shapes concepts of race, gender, class, and national identity on a global scale. Governments use transnational celebrity as evidence of their country’s cultural power, transmuting cultural influence into economic and political power. Meanwhile, celebrities who cross borders become potent and contested icons of national identity. At the grassroots level, citizens in diverse geographic contexts are becoming increasingly fluent in the global language of celebrity and are mobilizing it in new ways for personal and political projects. Reaching beyond the Global North, this book showcases research on transnational celebrity as a technology of soft power and counter-hegemonic organizing, and as a driver of discourses of race and migration. It also explores self-presentation and self-branding in the globalized attention economy. This book demonstrates the need for a renewed politicized treatment of the topic of celebrity in its transnational and globalizing reach. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Popular Communication.

Mehdi Semati is Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, USA. His writings on international communication and global media have appeared in various scholarly journals. He is the co-author of Iran and the American Media: Press Coverage of the ’Iran Deal’ in Context (2021).

Kate Zambon is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, USA. Her research in global media studies focuses on the politics of nationalism, migration, and cultural difference in Germany and Europe through the analysis of international sporting events, news, and entertainment media.