Project Fame: Decolonizing African Celebrity Studies

This project extends part of my first doctoral dissertation, which is about bringing scholarly attention to African celebrities and celebrity culture. I aim to study and galvanize others to study fame, celebrity, and stardom through the lens of African and African Diaspora perspectives while centering how gender, race, and sexuality, as well as transformations through time and space, have marked them. I deploy a lens of the indigenous Yoruba worldview and its epistemology and lived experiences through autoethnography, biography, autobiography, memoirs, ethnography, oral history, literature, proverbs, and archives to draw unity and discontinuities. I oscillate between the past and present of celebrities. I organized panels on Fame, Fandom, Celebrities, Politics, and the Economics of Attention in African Popular Culture for three consecutive years at the Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference.