Internationalising Celebrity Studies: turning towards Asia

Celebrity Studies is a growing interdisciplinary field; its members use diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to explore cultures of celebrity and an eclectic range of subjects. The field’s development, maturation and, in Franssen’s words (2020, p. 494), ‘ever-expanding universe’ is intertwined with the journal that bears its name, Celebrity Studies. Over the 10 years since its inauguration, Celebrity Studies has recognised the critical potential of analysing celebrity from a diversity of perspectives and encouraged provocative pieces that signal new research directions (Franssen 2020). However, as Su Holmes recognises in her valedictory editorial (Holmes et al. 2019), Western celebrities and cultures continue to dominate the field. Likewise, in their recent special issue on Star Studies’ perceived ‘mid-life crisis’, Shingler and Steenberg (2019) share their concerns about (the difficulty to arrest) the shared Western centricity of star and celebrity studies. Almost despite itself, Celebrity Studies remains Anglo-centric, largely focused on the global North, and predominated by Euro-American case studies. Moving the field forwards, its next phase of growth will benefit from greater attention to largely uncultivated local diversities beyond Western ideo-geographical and sociocultural contexts. As the world’s most populous continent, Asia has increasingly vibrant media, entertainment and celebrity industries. Stardom and celebrity are a central part of its globally expanding media, cultural and entertainment economies, interconnected and divided by numerous distinct national imaginaries and transnational vectors. Yet far from matching its booming, lucrative, and globalising entertainment and cultural industries, English-language celebrity scholarship has paid insufficient attention to Asian examples, or the complex and multifarious relationship between Asian and Western practices and perspectives on stardom, celebrity and fandom. This is borne out by stat