Seeing Stars
Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture
- Pramod K Nayar - University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Celebrity culture is marked by three main responses: adulation, identification, and emulation. The book proposes that these responses are generated as a result of media constructions of celebrities. Therefore, celebrity culture is something that must be studied as a consequence of new forms of media representation and mass culture.
The book's aim is to explore this phenomenon, especially from the 1990s. It is intended as a popular introduction to celebrity culture and a new 'society of spectacle' that is visible in India today through a rigorous analyses of a range of media sources.
Nayar’s book on celebrity culture examines the processes through which celebrities are constructed and packaged as ‘consumer products’…The chapters in the book reveal that celebrity culture is a revealing lens through which to view significant cultural shifts taking place in contemporary urban India. The analysis of celebrity culture in the book unravels changing conceptions of legitimacy, authority and credibility that are at work in Indian culture today…[The book] will be of great interest to students of consumption studies and consumer culture, media studies, celebrity studies, popular culture, and cultural studies, and Asian studies.
The book definitely marks the arrival of cultural studies in the department of literature in the country.
The style is informal and breezy, but the information is solid and in-depth, so it is accessible to readers beyond the purely academic. It offers interesting insights into an aspect of popular culture that is all around us and governs our lives in a hundred ways, yet we rarely give much thought to the phenomenon. Seeing stars should certainly wake us all up.
Seeing Stars has a resonance that goes beyond the academic sphere. It holds up a mirror to what we have become as a society.
A rare study of celebrity and Page3 culture in India, the book, explores “celebrity ecology” in order to understand the processes that transform a celebrity into a “consumer product”.
This is a valuable book, and would be of interest to scholars and lay readers alike.
A great source for students in film studies
The book critically examines celebrity and celebrity culture in general, and Indian celebritiy and celebrity culture in particular. With critical insight, it introduces a wide range of literature on celebrity and locates celebrity issues in socio-cultural, historical and political contexts.
