Watching Waleed: celebrity authenticity, Australian national identity, and the ideological work of The Project

ABSTRACT

Waleed Aly is the most visible Australian public intellectual from a non-Anglo-Australian background. In 2016, Aly won the most coveted prize in Australian television: The Gold Logie. He was voted the most popular celebrity on Australian television primarily on the basis of his role as the co-host of the news/entertainment panel show The Project. This article interrogates a selection of Aly’s notable media appearances with a focus on his role as the co-host of The Project, a popular current affairs show on Australian television, in order to unpack the complex relationship between his celebrity status and his standing as a public intellectual, which bestows Aly with a symbolic, if not literal, mandate of authority and authenticity. More specifically, the article analyses a series of complex performative acts that align Aly’s public persona with a normative conception of Australian national identity. These acts involve two fundamental co-implicated operations. The first is a conscious self-presentation best thought of in dramaturgical terms. The second is best apprehended with reference to those discursive and institutional factors that make a place ready for us in the order of things. Finally, the article presents an account of the ideological work performed by Aly’s ‘authentic’ celebrity persona.

KEYWORDS:

• Non-white celebrity studies
• Australian celebrity culture
• race and Australian national identity
• Waleed Aly
• celebrity authenticity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Glenn D’Cruz

Glenn D’Cruz teaches drama and cultural studies at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and Teaching Postdramatic Theatre (Palgrave, forthcoming 2017), and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007) and Contemporary Publics, with Katja Lee, David Marshall, and Sharyn Macdonald (Palgrave, 2016). He has published widely in national and international journals in the areas of literary studies, performance studies, and cultural studies.