Proposed ACLA Seminar-- Cursed Celebrity: Fame and Infamy in the Americas
If American mass media is an ecosystem, we cast the press as predators, and the celebrity as their prey. We envision the reporters grouped in a posse, arranged for an ambush. Camera flashes crack as they capture their quarry. By now, these perceptions have become truisms that obscure our own role as consumers in a matrix of violence, spectatorship, and stardom. If we condemn the paparazzi for their alleged violence, we also continue to revise and revisit their heyday in the age of print media. This seminar seeks papers that explore how violent desire—of the spectator, the press, the star – shaped the profusion of tabloid and true crime print culture across the Americas.