Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement

ABSTRACT

This special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well as with individuals who enjoyed easy access to the media as a consequence of their “celebrity capital” (Olivier Driessens, “Celebrity Capital: Redefining Celebrity using Field Theory,” Theory and Society 42 (2013)). This introduction to the special issue revisits the notion of “networked celebrity” (F. Turner and C. Larson, “Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals,” Public Culture 27, 1 (75) (2015)) in order to set the stage for the case histories that follow. Rather than considering the actions of individual women and men of renown with respect either to their individual “consecration” as celebrities in Pierre Bourdieu's well-known sense, or their capacity to extract individual benefit from it, the emphasis falls on understanding various manifestations of celebrity culture that take their bearings from the collaborative and decentred nature of the global protest against apartheid. The special issue challenges the individualising emphasis of celebrity studies and its predominantly metropolitan orientation, while offering a new set of perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the global anti-apartheid struggle.

KEYWORDS:

• Networked celebrity
• celebrity capital
• anti-apartheid movements
• protest
• solidarity

Acknowledgements

This special issue has benefited from the intellectual energies of many of our interlocutors. We would like particularly to thank Amanda Hammar and Detlef Siegfried who co-hosted the “Celebrity and Protest in Africa and in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle” International Workshop with us at the University of Copenhagen in October 2018, the conference participants who made the event so memorable, as well as members of the APARTHEID-STOPS research team for their input. We also want to acknowledge the generosity of our external reviewers and the support of the Critical Arts editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For studies of the role of anti-apartheid expressive culture in forging networks of “cultural solidarity” in the era of decolonisation and beyond, see Helgesson, Bethlehem, and Han (2018) as well as Bethlehem, Dalamba, and Phalafala (2019).

2 For explorations of Makeba exile in Guinea that address these topics without evoking celebrity studies as an explicit theoretical framework, see Bethlehem (2017), as well as Hashachar (2017, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program [FP/2007-2013/ERC Grant Agreement no. 615564].