Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture - Softcover

Pramod K Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His work in postcolonial studies includes English Writing and India, 1600–1920:Colonizing Aesthetics (2008), Postcolonial Literature: An Introduction (2008), The Great Uprising: India, 1857 (2007), The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar (2007) and The Penguin 1857 Reader (2007). His interests in cultural studies include superheroes, consumer culture, ‘cool’, posthumanism and new media cultures, and his work here includes An Introduction to Cultural Studies (2008), Reading Culture: Theory, Praxis, Politics (2006), Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cybertechnology (2004), and a book on literary and cultural theory (Literary Theory Today, 2002), besides numerous essays on cyberculture and, more recently, on human rights narratives. Among forthcoming books are a study of new media and cyberculture, postcolonialism, a history of the Raj and an edited collection on English life in India.

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.

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.