Masculine interventions and transnational celebrity activism in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti

Abstract

For a time following the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, two male celebrity activists dominated transnational media coverage of the recovery effort. Grammy-award winning musician Wyclef Jean and actor/director Sean Penn both reacted swiftly by travelling to Haiti and garnered praise for their financial and organisational contributions to the relief efforts. The two men also engaged in a brief conflict over who was the more legitimate activist in Haiti. The symbolically powerful feud between the two men produced themes of transformation, travel, time, and competence that relied upon gendered and racialised norms to position one man as a more authentic activist than the other. Through critical analysis, I argue that transnational media created a narrative around Jean and Penn in which masculinity, ethnic and national identity, and celebrity converge to reinforce oppositional male archetypes.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• activism
• colonialism
• masculinity
• Haiti

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Lori Henson and Shelley Bradfield for insightful feedback on early drafts of this study. An earlier version of the research was presented at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, 2012.

Notes

^1. The fundraising website, www.hopeforhaitinow.org (last accessed March 2012), is no longer functional.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spring-Serenity Duvall

Spring-Serenity Duvall is an assistant professor at Salem College, USA. Her research interests are in transnational celebrity culture, commodity activism, breastfeeding advocacy, and girls studies. Her analysis of Wyclef Jean and Sean Penn emerged from previous research on Bono, masculinity, race, and celebrity saviour rhetoric, published in the book Celebrity Colonialism: Fame, Power, and Representation in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures (ed. Robert Clarke). She is currently the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Transnational Studies at Brock University, Ontario, conducting a research project on Canadian celebrity activism. Her research has appeared in Communication, Culture, and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal of Children and Media, and multiple books chapters. She is the co-author, with Leigh Moscowitz, of the book Snatched: Child Abductions in US News Media (forthcoming, Peter Lang Publishing).