Death and celebrity: introduction

Keywords:

• posthumous fame
• legacies
• mourning
• memorialisation

WHEN I’M GONE PLEASE DON’T RELEASE ANY POSTHUMOUS ALBUMS OR SONGS WITH MY NAME ATTACHED. THOSE WERE JUST DEMOS AND NEVER INTENDED TO BE HEARD BY THE PUBLIC.

On 16 August 2021, the rapper, singer, and songwriter Anderson .Paak shared an image of his latest tattoo on Instagram.¹ The tattoo, situated on his forearm and consisting of nine lines of text printed in block capitals, forbids the release of any posthumous music. ‘Those were just demos and never intended to be heard by the public’ the inscription reads. Functioning as an embodied and indelible addition to any potential last will and testament, .Paak’s tattoo both underscores his personal preferences and calls into question the ethical motives attached to the production and dissemination of posthumous albums. Such questions are justified. At the time in which .Paak posted the image, debates had been taking place within the music industry surrounding the legacy of the American R&B singer Aaliyah (1979–2001), whose posthumous album Unstoppable (2022) was recently released by her estate prompting mixed responses from fans and cultural commentators. Pop Smoke, Juice Wrld, and Mac Miller are among other more recently deceased celebrities whose deaths have likewise signalled new and profitable phases in their respective music careers.

For Ruth Penfold-Mounce, celebrity careers are often subject to startling posthumous extensions and/or resurrections. ‘Death’, she argues, ‘opens up new avenues through which posthumous careers can thrive, even for people whose celebrity status is not rooted in film, television or music’ (2018, p. 29). The evidence for these lucrative extended careers can be found in the Forbes’ ‘Top Earning Dead Celebrities’ list (p. 22), but beyond the commercial successes of such posthumous ventures, Penfold-Mounce also claims that ongoing careers enable the celebrity dead ‘to wield agency to the extent that they can speak and keep working after death’ (p. 36). For fans of .Paak, however, the tattoo appears to embody only the inherently unethical, capitalistic, and financially exploitative nature of the kinds of posthumous work it seeks to reject. On Twitter, for instance, one poster who shared the image commented ‘You know the music industry is f*cked up when artists tattoo these type [sic] of things’ (@filipneuff, 17 August 2021). Other tweets similarly expressed concern for .Paak, with several grimly predicting that record labels, alert to the pecuniary advantages of releasing posthumous material, would no doubt forge ahead with the release of the artist’s unfinished demos, perhaps even using the image of his tattoo as the artwork for the album cover.

The commercial capital and marketing appeal – ‘necro-marketing’ – of ‘delebs’ (dead celebrities) has been extensively examined by scholars of celebrity in recent years (D’Rozario and Bryant 2013; D’Rozario 2016, Penfold-Mounce 2018). Diverging from such studies, this special edition of Celebrity Studies focuses more on the symbolic, emotional, and affective economies in which dead celebrities are imbricated. It explores the role of death in the construction, (re-)negotiation and perpetuation of celebrity identity, and seeks to interrogate the myths, symbolic meanings and (often contested) cultural legacies that cohere around the figure of the dead celebrity. Focusing on a diverse mix of case studies from the 1800s to the present day, this special edition asks how and why dead celebrities are immortalised, reified, exploited, or repudiated in the interests of specific historical and cultural values. It explores the various ways in which death enhances, diminishes, or transforms the parasocial relations between publics and celebrity figures, and interrogates the kinds of media apparatus involved in the curation, maintenance and re-assessment of posthumous fame. In so doing, it broadens the scope of much previous scholarship, examining the mediation and memorialisation of celebrity death not only in print and online media, but also through specific artworks, material objects and social spaces. Further, the edition helps to reorient the focus of existing criticism, considering the representation of celebrity death and the construction of posthumous fame in continental European and East Asian as well as Anglophone contexts. Building on existing analyses of iconic dead celebrities such as David Bowie (Black 2017, Graves-Brown and Orange 2017, Van den Bulck and Larsson 2017), Michael Jackson (Bennett 2010, Garde-Hansen 2010, Naylor 2010, Schwartz 2015), and Princess Diana (Merrin 1999, Foltyn 2008, Schwartz 2015), this special edition thus engages in a critical re-assessment of the complex legacies left by globally renowned figures from the fields of journalism, literature, music, cinema, and modern art, among others.

This critical survey opens in the nineteenth century with Samantha Pinto’s article, entitled ‘Spectacular Remains: Black Celebrity, Death, and the Aesthetics of Autopsy’. Aligning the history of dissection and autopsy with celebrity culture, death, and race, Pinto argues that ‘all three emerge out of the Westphalian secular state as key nodes of fantasy, fascination, and social reorganisation’ (p. 491). She examines two ‘in/famous’ dissections: Saartje Baartman’s dissection by the anatomist Georges Cuvier in 1815 and the autopsy of a victim of cholera in New Granada which was carried out by the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole and later recorded in her 1857 memoir Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. With reference to these two very different case studies, Pinto explores the extent to which the gendered and racialised dissected body and the act of autopsy intervene in and inform the presentation and performance of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity.

Next, Charlotte Boyce and Danielle Dove’s article, ‘Obituary, Gender, and Posthumous Fame: The New York Times Overlooked Project’, considers how narratives of gender and race have influenced the production, circulation, and reception of celebrity obituaries from the nineteenth century to the present day. Launched in 2018 by the NYT, ‘Overlooked’ is a reparative initiative that aims to address the gendered and racialised biases evident in obituary selection by attempting to rectify its omission of notable figures (most of whom are women and people of colour) from its obits section. Beginning with a history of the obituary, Boyce and Dove examine the retrospective nature of the NYT’s project and the ways in which this affects, informs, and challenges the structure, content and function of the celebrity obituary. They focus on two specific case studies from the ‘Overlooked’ project – the nineteenth-century author Charlotte Brontë and the journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett – drawing attention to the presentist modes in which their lives are (re-)written. Despite the project’s drive to rehabilitate and restore these ‘forgotten’ figures, the authors argue that ‘there is a danger that [the project] serves simply as a sticking-plaster, downplaying the urgency of the need for cultural change by masking the problem’ of who gets to be remembered in legacy media (p. 520).

While some celebrities are overlooked in death, others take on a transcendent, symbolic immortality. Chris Rojek uses the term ‘celebrity supernova’ to refer to the ‘death of an individual whose fame is so immense that their existence frames the character of the age’ (2012, p. 1). Harriet Fletcher’s article ‘The Death of the Star: Celebrity Decay and the Gothic Portrait in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych’ focuses on one such luminary. Examining Andy Warhol’s 1962 images of Marilyn Monroe, produced shortly after her death in August of that year, Fletcher argues that Marilyn Diptych offers a suitable material and visual object through which to examine notions of celebrity, death, and decay, ‘because it is an art form that historically has functioned to provide its subjects with a pictorial afterlife’ (p. 525). While the portrait is thus commonly read as a commemorative tool, serving to memorialise and even immortalise its subject, Fletcher suggests that Warhol’s images appear to eschew such preservative impulses by enhancing Monroe’s deathliness. By drawing attention to issues of decay and mortality, the image reveals an overt fascination with the fragility of existence and the untimely death of young stars, revealing that ‘the celebrity in the 1960s is an unstable Gothic body capable of death and decay’ (p. 525).

The shifting status and reception of celebrities after death provides the focus of the next two articles which interrogate the print reactions to deceased celebrities in Denmark and France, respectively. As Joli Jensen has pointed out, dead celebrities are typically enmeshed in a nexus of competing discourses, shaped by a variety of agents, including family, fans, journalists, critics and scholars (2005, p. xviii). The cultural meanings that circulate around the dead celebrity are therefore inherently plural, fluid and liable to shift over time: while death may initially help to cement, augment, or rehabilitate the celebrity’s public profile, it can also prompt a reputational re-evaluation, with the emergence of scandalous or unsavoury revelations resulting in the desecration of posthumous fame. ‘Senses of an ending: Danish reactions to the death of Elvis Presley in 1977’ by Bertel Nygaard addresses such concerns, pointing to Elvis’s status as ‘a polysemic and malleable cultural phenomenon’ (p. 539) While popularly constructed as the all-American rock’n’roll star, Elvis’s influence extended across the globe, including to Denmark, where TV and newspaper coverage of his death attested to his cultural significance. However, the Danish public reaction to his demise was far from homogeneous or univocal: Nygaard demonstrates that beneath a superficially cohesive shared grief, attitudes varied according to a complex mix of factors, including socio-cultural status, political affiliation and age. The contested emotional and interpretative responses to Elvis’s death are linked by Nygaard to a contemporaneous sense of crisis, decline and loss of futurity in late 1970s Denmark.

Following Nygaard, Chris Tinker’s essay ‘Posthumous Celebrity, Persona and Memorialisation: French Newspaper Coverage of the Popular Music Artist Johnny Hallyday’ is concerned with tracing the reaction of French print culture to the singer’s death in December 2017. Focusing on newspaper coverage during the two weeks immediately following Hallyday’s death, Tinker explores the star’s shifting celebrity status, legacy, and the issues raised around public mourning and memorialisation. He argues that ‘Initial posthumous newspaper coverage generates broad consensus around Hallyday’s persona emphasising a strong sense of loss; Hallyday’s mythical status; his position as a cohesive French national symbol with local and international, particularly US, significance; his worthiness as an object of intellectual interest; and his personal qualities and strength of character’, but notes that ‘dissenting’ voices and less positive views are also evident (p. 559). While the newspaper reports tend to cohere around a largely unified and hagiographical view of Hallyday, Tinker suggests that a particular site of debate emerges in relation to the singer’s memorialisation. The nature, scale, cost, and suitability of the posthumous tributes and events planned in Hallyday’s honour are the subject of scrutiny and raise important questions about cultural memory, celebrity, and practices of commemoration.

Phoenix Andrews’ article ‘“Are Di would of loved it”: Reanimating Princess Diana Through Dolls and AI’ evinces a similar interest in posthumous memorialisation but moves beyond print to examine the role of social media, artificial intelligence, and dolls in mediating Princess Diana’s celebrity identity two decades after her death. Recent advances in digital culture have made ‘the dead perpetually accessible to anyone with an internet connection’, while commemorative practices on social media have provided ‘a model for rediscovering the sense of community within our public spaces’, as Davide Sisto points out (2020, p. 25, p. 126). Andrews’ article uses their own playful and ironic creative contributions to Diana’s vibrant online fandom – including animated Diana dolls lip-synching to contemporary pop songs – to highlight how ‘Diana remains a way for a diverse range of individuals and communities to talk about the people, emotions and ideas that are most important to them’ (p. 588). Subversive and comical digital ‘Are Di’ content invites and enables the kinds of openly emotional communal responses that were mocked in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death, Andrews notes, showing that, despite occasional accusations of tastelessness or disrespect, ‘laughter and nostalgia can sit well together’ in the commemorative activities of online participatory spaces (p. 582).

The final article in this special issue, Ana Howe Bukowski and Junyi Lv’s article, ‘Reimagining Leslie Cheung through Hanyuan Bookstore: the Posthumous Personalities of the Queer Hong Kong Celebrity’, also explores aspects of post-death fandom, asking how, and with what implications, celebrity deaths function as sites of collective memory and mourning. Focusing on the Hong Kong singer and actor Leslie Cheung, Bukowski and Lv undertake a spatial analysis of one of his favourite haunts, the Hanyuan Bookstore in Shanghai, which became a site of pilgrimage for fans following his death by suicide in 2003. They examine the ways in which the Bookstore (now closed) facilitated posthumous parasocial interactions between Cheung and his fans, with a specific focus on its queer temporal-spatial orientation. The ‘embodied memory’ of Cheung ‘as a queer celebrity’ is brokered via the Hanyuan’s ‘affective environment’, Bukowski and Lv conclude: ‘negotiated through senses of imagined co-presence and visitation brought on through rituals of pilgrimage and written memorialization’ (p. 598).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Boyce

Charlotte Boyce is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research centres on Victorian literature and culture, with specific focus on food/ consumption, and the history of celebrity. She has co-authored monographs on A History of Food in Literature (2017) and Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson’s Circle (2013), and recently co-edited with Danielle Dove a special issue of Victoriographies on ‘Death, Nineteenth-Century Celebrity and Material Culture’ (2022).

Danielle Dove

Danielle Mariann Dove is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Surrey, UK. Her research and publications centre on Victorian and neo-Victorian literature, material culture, dress history, and literary celebrity. She is the co-editor of Neo-Victorian Things (2022), and together with Charlotte Boyce co-edited a special issue of Victoriographies on ‘Death, Nineteenth-Century Celebrity and Material Culture’ (2022).

Notes

1. Shared as a story, the picture is no longer available on .Paak’s Instagram page, but was shared widely via his followers on a variety of social media outlets, where it can still be found.