Seeing stars: spectacle, society and celebrity culture, by Pramod K. Nayar, London, Sage, 2009, 220 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-817-829-9075

Seeing stars: spectacle, society and celebrity culture, by Pramod K. Nayar, London, Sage, 2009, 220 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978-817-829-9075

The existence of this journal, devoted to the study of celebrity, indicates the renewed scholarly interest in the representation, circulation and consumption of mediated personalities. However, it is probably uncontroversial to suggest that much work on celebrity culture is still fairly Anglo-centric in its selection of celebrities to analyse and discuss. Pramod K. Nayar's Seeing Stars is an interesting addition to the current body of work on celebrity culture, given that the author primarily uses Indian celebrities – drawn mainly from sport, movies, politics and reality TV – to interrogate ideas around spectacle, society and celebrity culture. It is refreshing to read a discussion of celebrity culture that offers some comparative analyses of national celebrity ecologies alongside the recognition that many celebrities occupy a transnational space in the global symbolic.

Some years ago, Ron Selby and Keith Cowdery (1995, p. 1) pointed out that ‘it is easy to watch TV, however, it is hard to write analytically about it’. The same problem of determining what is to be studied attends the study of celebrity culture. Pramod K. Nayar tackles the seemingly endless discursive trail involved in the production, circulation and consumption of celebrity by suggesting that we need to study what he terms ‘celebrity ecology’ in all its facets to begin to produce a holistic view of the object of study. The breadth of ambition here is commendable, but sometimes the attempt at holism means that detailed theoretical discussion and sustained analysis of case-study material are inevitably sacrificed in a text of fewer than 200 pages in length.

Seeing Stars is positioned as a broad introductory text. The author suggests that it is beyond the book's remit to examine differences between the nature of celebrity within different fields, such as those of sport, music and film. Instead, the term ‘celebrity’ is used as a more general descriptor for those recognised widely as a direct result of concentrated representation within the mass media. This seems a justifiable organisational strategy but there is, as a result, an explanatory deficit for those interested in how celebrities in different fields may articulate and represent divergent aspirations and anxieties around identity and identification. Inevitably, the author does attempt some tentative explanations for the differing appeals of, for instance, cricketers and Bollywood stars, but I was left with a feeling that, in such cases, questions of gender and nation were worked through in significantly different ways in the examples from sport and film discussed; such differences would have benefited from further discussion.

Nayar provides an overview of some debates familiar to scholars of celebrity. Rojek's typology of celebrity and his notions of the celetoid and celebrification are present. Work by Graeme Turner and P. David Marshall is briefly discussed and Su Homes and Sean Redmond are cited along the way. Attention is paid to work on fan culture and to the spectacular function of celebrity. However, again because of the introductory nature of the text, existing scholarship is treated rather superficially at times. The author indicates the compromises he was required to make by reproducing some of the commissioning discussion with his editor at Sage, who requested that he ‘lay off the academic jargon’. As the editor's advice indicates, this is clearly a text that Sage wishes to promote beyond its core academic and student audience. This is reinforced by the back-cover synopsis, which claims that the book is ‘in-depth as well as accessible, academic as well as entertaining’ and is a text that will have ‘resonance with the general audience’. All these ambitions are fine, but they are difficult to achieve in a single text. Some of the broad sweeps in theoretical discussion and analysis do leave important gaps, given that the book is intended to inform academic neophytes about celebrity culture.

Nayar offers the reader a logical chapter structure which begins with an attempt at defining celebrity. He moves on to examine how celebrities are constructed and articulated across media forms before offering an interesting account of how celebrities function as spectacle, paying particular attention to the aestheticised nature of the celebrity image as portrayed in advertising, print media and on television. It was particularly heartening to see a focus upon the inter-relationships between celebrity culture and consumer culture, which can sometimes be obscured in accounts that focus upon how celebrity provides a resource for individual meaning-making.

Nayar's next chapter, on celebrity and scandal, makes good use of Indian and Euro-American case-study material to explore how national structures of feeling serve to demarcate the moral boundaries of scandal. He notes that while the Clinton–Lewinsky affair raised questions of character and moral integrity in the American media, in the Indian setting, politicians’ sex scandals receive far less media and public interest, with the politician's morality seen as of less consequence than the morality of a Bollywood film star such as Shilpa Shetty, who was memorably treated to an unwelcome but enthusiastic embrace by Hollywood's Richard Gere. Such cultural comparison is one of the strengths of Nayar's text, although it is not always fully developed in other chapters.

The concluding chapter focuses upon the consumption of celebrity, paying particular attention to the nature of fandom and fan productivity. The author examines fan poetry posted on a website devoted to Bollywood star Sharuk Khan. For example, Nayar offers interesting discussions of fan poetry posted on a website devoted to Bollywood star Sharuk Khan and the phenomenon of fans submitting internet posts of career statistics for cricketer Sachen Tendulkar. On a personal note, Nayar observes that his young son's mock battles between Power Rangers and Transformers action figures constitute a form of fan fiction. There is a great deal to interest those new to the study of fan culture in this chapter, but I would have liked more detailed discussion and analysis of specific fan productivity and interactions. More detailed analysis of case-study material would have strengthened Nayar's argument that an observable demotic turn in celebrity culture has reconstructed fans as performers. Sustained attention to the subtleties, complexities and contradictions of fan performance would have been illuminating. Why do cricket fans post statistics, Bollywood fans write poetry and five-year-old boys revel in the symbolic clash of plastic symbols of power and control? The author might argue fairly that these are precisely the sort of questions that the reader might wish to contemplate and go on to research for themselves. However, some tentative explanations of these phenomena would have provided some meat for further argument and discussion.

As an admittedly monolingual British reviewer I would have liked some more biographical detail on the cast of Indian celebrity characters that are introduced to the reader throughout the text. Such contextual information would have made it possible to consider how the salience of Nayar's arguments around celebrity in the Indian context. Sometimes terminology and biography do matter, especially when readers may be unfamiliar with local vernacular and personalities. For instance, I now know that ‘Page 3 people’ is an Indian–English term for celebrities; I only know that, however, after a quick web search, despite the use of the term without explanation in the first paragraph of the book's preface.

Seeing Stars has many virtues as an introductory text. It does not assume theoretical knowledge and meets its remit of ‘laying off’ academic jargon. It uses case-study material that will be unfamiliar to many readers and thus adds to the sum of knowledge about differing articulations of celebrity within national contexts. Its ambition to cover the production, circulation and consumption of celebrity does, as I have suggested, sometimes lead to perfunctory treatment of theoretical concepts and case-study analysis. The book is written in an engaging style, although there are a number of grammatical errors that should have been picked up at the proofing stage. In conclusion, Seeing Stars is a useful, although not essential, text for the study of celebrity.