The Theatricality of Humanitarianism: A Critique of Celebrity Advocacy

In this article, I engage with humanitarian celebrity as a communicative structure that historically articulates various discourses of solidarity. Specifically, I approach this communicative structure as a theater of pity that, by circulating images and stories about suffering, proposes dispositions of emotion and action to the West. Whereas, I argue, the traditional critique of celebrity humanitarianism challenges celebrity as spectacle that...