Littler, Jo. 2015. The New Victorians? Celebrity charity and the demise of the welfare state. Celebrity Studies, 6(4), pp. 471-485. ISSN 1939-2397 [Article]

Preview

Text The_New_Victorians_Celebrity_charity_and.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (192kB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

This article asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon with the philanthropic endeavours of prominent nineteenth-century persons. The article notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present is fairly dramatic in comparison with that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like a ‘historical blip’. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in – and gain forms of power through – involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of nineteenth-century interventions, bequests and donations? What might the key differences between forms of spectacular ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This article draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault’s distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas ‘celanthropy’ in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Celebrity Studies on 25th September 2015, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/19392397.2015.1087213. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords:	celebrity, charity, celanthropy, philanthropy, philanthrocapitalism
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Dates:	Date Event 29 January 2015 Accepted 25 September 2015 Published Online 2015 Published
Item ID:	38413
Date Deposited:	24 Feb 2025 10:36
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2025 11:59
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38413

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)