Essays in Celebrity Culture: Stars and Styles

187 Pages·2021·2.489 MB·English

by  Pramod K. Nayar

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Essays in Celebrity Culture
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Essays in Celebrity Culture

Stars and Styles
Pramod K. Nayar
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Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2021
by ANTHEM PRESS
75– 76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Pramod K. Nayar 2021
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935802
ISBN- 13: 978- 1- 78527- 786- 3 (Hbk)
ISBN- 10: 1- 78527- 786- 3 (Hbk)
Cover image: AlexanderLipko/Shutterstock.com
This title is also available as an e- book.
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CONTENTS

Preface vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Stars, Styles, Society and Spectacle 1
Part 1. Bollywood and Celebrity
1. Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele- Meme 15
2. Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular
Cosmopolitanism 33
3. Celebrity, Charisma, and Post- truth Relations: Agnogenesis,
Affect, and Bollywood 51
Part 2. Celebrity and Lifewriting
4. What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India 67
5. Biopics 75
6. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs 83
Part 3. Celebrity, Culture and Politics
7. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity 93
8. Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New
Grammars of Protest 107
9. Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case
of Arundhati Roy 131
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10. Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar
Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India 145
11. Authors, Self- Fashioning and Online Cultural Production in the
Age of Hindu Celevision 157
Index 175
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PREFACE

Celebrity Studies has been a part of my academic work consistently, and one
essay a year has been an average. The current volume’s intentional and con-
textual diversity and variety stems from the fact that these essays were written
for specific contexts, adhering to the demands made by anthologies, journals
and special issues. Hopefully, these same features will reveal numerous shades
(more than fifty) of the celebrity.
The essays brought together here represent work that has appeared in
the last decade, and since my first foray into the field, in the form of Seeing
Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (2009). They appear here unrevised
and unedited from their original published version.
Hyderabad, India
December 2020
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

These essays first appeared in anthologies and journals. I am very grateful to
editors of volumes for inviting me to contribute and the referees for their pres-
cient and probing comments and suggestions, which made the essays much
better than they would otherwise have been.
Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele- Meme. In Anthony Elliott
(ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies. Routledge, 2018.
Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.
In David Marshall and Sean Redmond (eds), The Blackwell Companion to
Celebrity. Wiley- Blackwell, 2016.
Celebrity, Charisma and Post- truth Relations: Agnogenesis, Affect and
Bollywood. In J. P. Zúquete (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Charisma.
Routledge, 2021, 408– 17
What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India, 2017–2 018. Biography 42.1
(2019): 62– 68.
Biopics: The Year in India. Biography 40.4 (2017): 604– 10.
Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs. Biography 43.1 (2020): 86–93.
Indian Writing in English as Celebrity. In Om Dwivedi and Lisa Lau (eds), Indian
Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Palgrave- Macmillan, 2015.
Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New Grammars of
Protest. Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 292– 310.
Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy. Open
Cultural Studies 1.1 (2017): 46– 54.
Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the
‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India. Celebrity Studies 11.1 (2020): 116– 24.
Authors, Self-F ashioning and Online Cultural Production in the Age of Hindu
Celevision. In Xenia Zeiler (ed.), Digital Hinduism. Routledge, 2019.
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