ABSTRACT
An increasingly visible part of contemporary popular culture is the phenomenon of celebrities from the Global North using their fame to draw attention to social problems in the Global South, particularly sub-Saharan Africa. Megastars such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie, for example, have adopted children from Africa and Southeast Asia and become the public face of the increasingly popular process of transnational adoption. Big-name celebrities have lent their star power to campaigns organized by major humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF (for which the actress Audrey Hepburn served as Goodwill Ambassador), Oxfam (which has worked with numerous “celebrity ambassadors,” including the British actress Helen Mirren and U.S. football star Larry Fitzgerald), and the Christian Children’s Fund (which created a famous campaign of late-night, “adopt-a-child” ads featuring the actress Sally Struthers). Other Global North celebrities have played a more direct role in helping to organize their own humanitarian campaigns, such as when the singer Bob Geldof spearheaded the famous 1985 Live Aid concert to support famine relief for Ethiopia. More recently, one of the most famous and decorated journalists in the world, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times , joined his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, to lead the Half the Sky Movement. The Half the Sky documentary film features a series of prominent actresses, including Meg Ryan and Eva Mendes, as they travel around the world with Kristof and WuDunn in an effort to promote women’s empowerment.
