Afterlife as Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame

Front Cover
Steve Jones, Joli Jensen
Peter Lang, 2005 - Art - 293 pages
The mass media make it possible for fame to be enhanced and transformed posthumously. What does it mean to fans when a celebrity dies, and how can death change the way that celebrities are perceived and celebrated? How do we mourn and remember? What can different forms of communication reveal about the role of media in our lives?
Through a provocative look at the lives and legacy of popular musicians from Elvis to Tupac and from Louis Prima to John Lennon, Afterlife as Afterimage analyzes the process of posthumous fame to give us new insights into the consequences of mediation, and it illuminates the complex nature of fandom, community formation, and identity construction.
 

Contents

Altared Sites Celebrity Webshrines as Shared Mourning
17
Flaunting It Style Identity and the Social Construction
31
Elvis Forever
61
Commemoration as Crossover Remembering Selena
81
Karen The Hagiographic Impulse Anorexia in the Public Memory
97
Posthumous Patsy Clines Constructions of Identity
121
Collectively Remembering Tupac The Narrative Mediation
143
Who Owns Him? The Debate on John Lennon
171
Taming the Wildest What Weve Made of Louis Prima
191
The Strange Career of Robert Johnsons Records
209
A Career in Music From Obscurity to Immortality
237
Dead Rock Stars 1900
253
Echo Homo
269
List of Contributors
277
Copyright

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