Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America by Carrie Teresa, and: Celebrity: A History of Fame by Susan J. Douglas and Andrea McDonnell (review)

Smiling and self-consciously raking fingers through his hair, a blond boy delivers a string of platitudes into his laptop camera: "Don't let anybody's opinion stop you from chasing your dreams, OK? If you got a dream, you gotta protect it and chase it, guys. I love y'all so much. My social media is in the bio." Later, Austyn Tester will be on tour with other smiling boys, some brunet, some with shorter hair, but all delivering a similar torrent of positive pablum. Perhaps no film this year better captures the contemporary relationship between medium and celebrity than Jawline (Liza Mandelup, 2019), which tracks the manufacture of YouTube personalities and their relationship to the young fans who line up for hugs and selfies with their favorite stars. One girl in the film explains that Julian and Jovani Jara convinced her to stop self-harming. Another says, "Their joy is making us happy, and making us feel like we mean something." Tester, we will learn, doesn't make the cut; he is quickly dropped back into a life of rural poverty. Despite its behind-the-scenes look at a very new style of fan-star relationship, Jawline is only the most recent illustration that for celebrity studies, too, the medium is the message: the formats in which stars appear dictate the outlines of fan-celebrity bonds.

Two new books about celebrity, Carrie Teresa's Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America and Susan J. Douglas and Andrea McDonnell's Celebrity: A History of Fame, offer considerations of celebrity grounded in material histories of media forms. Such a claim is not necessarily shocking or new, for, as Richard deCordova, Amelie Hastie, Richard Dyer, and the authors gathered in Christine Gledhill's important star studies collection have established, celebrity is a phenomenon managed in site-specific ways: on the screen, in scrapbooks, in fan periodicals, and in merchandizing tie-ins.¹ Building on this work, Looking at the Stars and Celebrity foreground particular media contexts as productive of different celebrity types, including, but not limited to, film stars.

Douglas and McDonnell's book states its claim about celebrity and medium explicitly: "Emphasizing [the] link between the particular affordances of different media, both traditional and digital, and the nature and proliferation of celebrity culture, is one of our central points."² This is a claim worth making, especially because star studies often focus on the charisma of biographical stars or their historical contexts with only a quick look at the platforms through which their publics accessed them, and Celebrity offers a wide range of chapters detailing the relationship between celebrity and different media forms from nineteenth-century print culture to contemporary online platforms. As a result, the book tells a story that shifts away from celebrities as agents and places them much more within a media ecosystem. However, in probing the case across time, the ambitious span of this book necessarily produces a level of generality, which may make it more useful as a text for the undergraduate classroom than a scholarly provocation.

One of the virtues of Celebrity for classroom use is the clarity with which it summarizes the more complex operations of stardom, as when the authors explain the contradiction "at the heart of celebrity culture": "Celebrities are seen as unique and elevated above people, above the masses, yet are absolutely dependent on the good will and admiration of those masses."³ It is easy enough to imagine a robust class discussion, with students providing examples of this phenomenon from their own media diets. In their discussion of the Astor Place riots, in which fans of actors who signified different social...