![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Scholarship of celebrity humanitarianism has been dominated by Western icons like Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and Bono, whose high-profile engagement has sought to alleviate various political, ecological, and humanitarian crises. In the past two decades, Asian stars have engaged in humanitarian issues as extensively as their North American or European counterparts. The intellectual effort devoted to this category of celebrity, nevertheless, remains scarce. To fill this gap, this article explores the crossover image of celebrated and powerful Bollywood celebrity-humanitarian, Aamir Khan. In what ways does Khan’s goodwill envision and contend cosmopolitan ideals? How does his commercialised presence in China complicate or explicate his embodied experience of advocacy? Finally, what does his commercial and benevolent engagement convey about Asian celebrity power in the global politics of star-making? This article adopts cosmopolitanism as the critical framework to examine Khan’s oscillation between cosmopolitan prospects and local attachments. It argues Khan’s Asian-yet-global persona exhibits a new mode of consciousness, which I describe as cosmopolitical, to thrive commercially and benevolently in multiple cultural and media networks. By so doing, this article not only attempts to disrupt Western-centric scholarship about celebrity humanitarianism but also expands the parameter of analysing Asian star power in bourgeoning networked cultures.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Asian countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, and India are often considered as the Global South, a debatable term, both politically and critically, that marks a shift from a focus on development or cultural difference towards an emphasis on geopolitical power relations. (Dados and Connell Citation2012, p. 12).
2. Secret Superstar also has attracted recognition from Chinese state-run media, People’s Daily, lauding the film for ‘touching the soul’ (People’s Daily Citation2018).
3. Primarily based in a pedagogical context, Martha Nussbaum (Citation1998) argues for the importance of alternative beliefs and behaviours and culturally inflected multiple perspectives of students in the non-Western world, including Africa and Asia. Her theory provocatively breaks down the inclination to hierarchise cultures, which, oriented in post-Enlightenment philosophy, positioned Westernised culture as more developed than Eastern or African cultures.
4. Sociologist Max Weber defined charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least superficially exceptional qualities’ (Weber Citation1968, p. 48).
5. In Bharat Ek Khoj, Jawaharlal Nehru was depicted by Indian-born British actor, Roshan Seth, who played the same character in the Oscar-winning epic, Gandhi (1983).
6. The official website: https://www.paanifoundation.in
7. The Oprah Winfrey Show is one of the long-running and highest-rated talk shows in America. Hosted by actress-philanthropist, Oprah Winfrey, the show includes content ranging from inspirational stories of ordinary people to interviews with celebrities and professionals.
8. For the purpose of boosting registration for ‘Jalmitra’, an array of publicity videos was posted on Twitter. An April 8 post unfolds Khan residing in a vast piece of dry land and speaking in a compassionate tone, ‘Walk shoulder-to-shoulder with our brothers and sisters in the villages to contribute towards their betterment. Help a village’ (Taneja Citation2018). As an effort of bridging the urban-rural divide, the event attracted more than one hundred thousand participants (UNI Citation2018). Besides Twitter, the Panni Foundation builds its official website, which hosts an array of videos in Marathi that exposit in detail the various dimensions of watershed management. Highly instructional and free-to-watch, these videos are the material of their training programme conducted among villagers. Stories of ‘water heroes’ on the website reveal how ordinary people work hard to overcome poverty and bridged political divides, making their area water-abundant. In addition, the Foundation has launched The Satyamev Jayate Water Cup (direct extension of Khan’s television show), a competition among multiple villages to see which one can achieve the maximum work for water conservation and watershed management in the designated period of time. The theme song of the competition is available on YouTube.
9. Global consultancy PWC reports that box office revenues in China in 2016 surpassed US$8 billion. The occurrence portends that China’s film market could outstrip the US to top the world as soon as 2021 (Liu Citation2018). However, due to the coronavirus, China’s box office is estimated to drop RMB64.3 billion (Davis Citation2020).
10. Directed by Ashutosh Gowariker, Lagaan tells the story of how the inhabitants of a small village in British-colonised India strive to win a game of cricket in order to avoid heavy tax and to contend for their destiny.
11. Secret Superstar is a record-breaking coming-of-age musical-drama about a heroine who uploads a YouTube video as she pursues her dream as a singer. It grossed more than US$98 million in China alone. In the first week since its release on China’s theatrical screens, it gained more than US$46 million (Liu Citation2018).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Film, Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include celebrities, stardom, fandom, transnational cinema, Asian cinema, and digital culture, and participatory culture. Her publications appear in journals such as positions: Asia critique, Continuum, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Journal of Asian Cinema, and several edited volumes. She is also the author of Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (2019) and Reorienting Chinese Stars in Global Polyphonic Networks: Voice, Ethnicity, Power (2021).