The European Research Council Project APARTHEID-STOPS, “The Perception of Apartheid in Western Europe 1960-1990” Research Cluster, and the Centre of African Studies of the University of Copenhagen, invite submissions to an interdisciplinary research workshop focusing on the role of celebrities and celebrity culture in the anti-apartheid struggle, as well as on celebrity culture in relation to solidarity with or within Africa more generally. 

 

Through circulating papers in advance, and through limiting the number of participants, we aim to provide a space for in-depth and exploratory discussions on the roles that celebrities have played in generating protest against the apartheid regime and creating solidarity with oppressed South Africans and with Africa more widely. 

 

In contrast to the resolutely Northern or metropolitan orientation of the existing scholarship on celebrity culture and political protest, we seek to broaden the conversation both in terms of location and the range of topics. So for example, we ask how developments in mass media, travel and information technology as well as technologies of circulation intersected with celebrity engagement in the anti-apartheid struggle as a particularly intense arena of engagement. 

 

In addition to scholarship focusing on celebrities from the entertainment industry, we invite proposals that adopt a broader perspective that also consider politicians, clergymen, journalists and activists as celebrities, even if at a different level of resolution. We welcome papers that examine both celebrated figures who harnessed their star power to the cause, as well as those whose work in the struggle against apartheid turned them into celebrities. 

 

Although the neoliberal narrative of celebrity prevalent today pivots around the achievements of singular individuals, we aim to open the discussion to more networked stories of collaboration and solidarity. We ask presenters to consider the international and transnational networks and institutions that underpin celebrity protest and solidarity. Thus presenters are encouraged to think about African, Asian, Soviet, and non-Western celebrities and their investment in or contribution to the anti-apartheid struggle. 

 

What can be said of the temporality of these engagements? Is there room to challenge the established chronology of celebrity and humanitarian celebrity-advocacy as only becoming widespread from the 1980s onwards? Lastly, we also seek to solicit papers that explore the more conflicted nature of celebrity involvement: Did celebrities from the North (or elsewhere) succeed in their quest to draw attention to the social evils of apartheid or did they divert attention from the daily acts of violence and suffering of the constituencies they sought to represent by focusing attention on themselves as individuals? Did this take agency away from activists on the ground and silence voices from the South?  

 

While the focus on South Africa and anti-apartheid struggles remains primary to the conference, and is acknowledged as a particularly powerful case-history, the intention is also to open the conversation to include perspectives on celebrity and solidarity from broader Africa-related experiences. In this regard, a specific panel is planned that would explore experiences of celebrities’ engagements with Africa-focused concerns, be these related to key humanitarian, development or political/rights-based issues. Here too, we seek to address the various kinds of celebrity engagements and their consequences for different solidarity movements and for the causes and contexts these movements aimed to affect, including domestic politics more broadly conceived. 

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We also invite applications for a Special Issue of the journal Critical Arts on "Celebrity and Protest in the Anti Apartheid Struggle." For more details follow the link: https://apartheidstops.wixsite.com/celebrityandprotest