Performing microcelebrity: Analyzing Papi Jiang's online persona through stance and style

ABSTRACT Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance)*

“A Nondescript Monster”: Fanny Fern in Transatlantic Print Culture

Fanny Fern (real name Sara Payson Willis Parton) was one of the most profitable American columnists and novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Fern sustained her celebrity status largely through unauthorised reprints of her articles in American and British papers. Consequently, her public image was for the most part constructed through those reprinted articles, which were usually framed by speculations about her private life. This article examines the implications and limitations of Fern’s efforts to stabilise the dissemination of her public image in periodicals by using the relatively more stable form of the book. As a celebrity, she had limited control over the way she was publicly represented. As a woman in the public sphere, she was particularly vulnerable to slander and libel. The circulation of a spurious biography entitled The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern (1855), alongside her sanctioned autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, profited from her literary brand while simultaneously undermining it. Examining how these competing narratives about Fern’s private life – one fictionalised, one unauthorised – shaped her literary reputation at home and in England, this paper argues that textual representations as well as material market choices, including book bindings and advertising techniques, shaped authorship in the increasingly commercialised transatlantic literary market of the mid-century in ways that both benefited and imperilled the female writer.

‘With the Authors Compts’: John Cam Hobhouse’s Uses of ‘Byron’

This article focuses on the intersections of politics, celebrity, authorship, and print culture in John Cam Hobhouse’s publishing career and his associations with Byron. The nature of print authorship and Byron’s ascendant celebrity status forced Hobhouse to consider the dichotomy between individual and author. As Byron’s meteoric literary rise contrasted with the slower and haltingly achieved political trajectory of Hobhouse, the latter was not above using his earlier and ongoing publishing and personal collaborations with Byron as a means to attain political standing. At Chicago’s Newberry Library I discovered a previously undocumented piece of marginalia: an authorial inscription by, or on behalf of, Hobhouse to Viscount Sidmouth in a copy of the first edition of his Journey through Albania, as well as some meaningful marginalia elsewhere in the book. In light of Hobhouse’s important role in instigating the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, this article reconsiders Hobhouse’s ambivalent relationship to the lasting effects of both print authorship and manuscript handwriting.

A TOPOGRAPHY OF VIRTUAL INFLUENCERS

Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discourses, and anxieties similarly characterising Hollywood’s “synthespians” at the turn of the twenty-first century; the legacy of “virtual idols” in East Asia (also known as “Vocaloids” in Japan); and the latter’s recent democratisation by a new generation of “vTubers” across video-sharing sites. Recognising this cross-medium migration of virtual celebrity—from anime, video games and blockbuster cinema to the participatory web—this paper adopts a platform-specific lens to highlight the affordances, cultures and vernaculars of specific social media as essential to virtual influencers’ aspiration to, and attainment and maintenance of, attention and fame.

Queering Fashion in Hajji Baba: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity

James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) shaped orientalist stereotypes until the early twentieth century. Scholars have examined the novel’s racism separately from gender and class anxieties in the often-neglected sequel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Reading these two novels jointly reveals a British imperial masculinity in crisis during a precarious period in Anglo-Persian relations: the embassy of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi Ilchi from Qajar Iran to late Georgian Britain in 1809–10 and 1819–20. This essay argues that Abul Hassan’s celebrity status in the tabloid news media inspired Londoners to adopt Persian fashions queerly, their gender deviancy informing Morier’s fiction about a foppish cross-dressed upstart from Ispahan. I argue that Abul Hassan’s mediatized body drove Morier to satirize fashionable Englishmen as a foreign race, allowing him to claim British gentility. Less concerned with Persians than with their effeminate admirers in England, his satire suggests that the “Orient” was constituted by intersectional gender, class, and racial identities in flux.

The Original Renegade

This chapter provides a critical framework for understanding the symbiotic relationship between hip hop and Dubsmash. Influenced by scholarship in critical race theory, gender studies, and hip hop, this chapter explores how Renegades have forged an inclusive digital community through Dubsmash. This chapter argues that Dubsmash’s culture of giving credit is the nexus from which a shared sense of values grows, one that encourages Dubsmashers to recognize the work of other artists. To demonstrate this, this chapter uses Jalaiah Harmon, the “Original Renegade,” as a case study. Harmon’s origin story from anonymous viral dance creator to full-blown celebrity status demonstrates how hip hop values operate in the Dubsmash community.

(Dis)embodied voices

This chapter discusses the role of singers in shaping the nascent industry of the gabinetes fonográficos in Spain and, in turn, how the newly developing recording industry influenced their careers and on the music profession. It argues that, even though the phonograph did not revolutionize at this stage the working lives of Spanish singers, it planted the seeds for crucial developments that would take place in the following decades. Indeed, a few singers—only a minority of which had acquired celebrity status on stage—conscientiously developed the expertise and skills necessary to go into the studio, and managed to advance their careers on that basis, at least for a short period of time. Although the chapter does not deal with the minute details of performance practice, it discusses aspects of the music profession and its relationship with recordings that might inform study of performance practice.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain is one of the most fascinating figures in American history. His literary works have intrigued, illuminated, inspired, and irritated millions from the late 1860s to the present. Twain was arguably America’s greatest writer from 1870 to 1910. In an era of mostly lackluster presidents and before the advent of movie, radio, television, and sports stars, Twain was probably the most popular person in America during the 1890s and competed with only Theodore Roosevelt for the title in the 1900s; his celebrity status exceeded that of European kings. Twain’s varied experiences as a journeyman printer, riverboat pilot, prospector, journalist, novelist, humorist, businessman, and world traveler, combined with his incredible imagination and astonishing creativity, enabled him to devise some of American literature’s most memorable characters and engaging stories. Twain was mesmerized, perplexed, frustrated, infuriated, and inspired by Christianity. He strove to understand, critique, and promote various theological ideas and insights. Twain’s religious perspective was complex, inconsistent, and sometimes even contradictory and constantly changed. While many scholars have ignored Twain’s strong focus on religious matters, others disagree sharply about his religious views, with most labeling him a secularist, an agnostic, or an atheist. The evidence indicates, however, that throughout his life he engaged in a lover’s quarrel with God. Twain was an entertainer, a satirist, novelist, and reformer, but he also functioned as a preacher, prophet, and social philosopher. He tackled universal themes with penetrating insight and wit including the character of God, human nature, sin, providence, corruption, greed, hypocrisy, poverty, racism, and imperialism. Moreover, Twain’s life provides a window into the principal trends and developments in American religion from 1865 to 1910.