ABSTRACT
While stardom outside one’s home country still holds an undeniable appeal for performers, it carries certain liabilities in the current global cultural economy. In a time of intense regional and global cultural traffic, transborder fame can transpire in unexpected temporalities and distant geographies. The same dynamic processes can result in an unpopular2 mixture of celebrity and politics. Such situations present to us a timely opportunity to formulate an idea of stardom that goes beyond the naïve assumption that stardom is the result some kind of individual achievement or that it is merely the desired end product of culture industry manipulation. Stardom is better understood as a result of the compounding effect of media work, cultural formations, technological interfaces, and the flow of commodity and currency, and it is one of the primary constituents of public culture.
