How Migrants Have Re-Written the Celebrity Script
What is it about?
With an attention to experiences of migration, exile and detainment, and through close readings of documentary The Wolfpack (2015), HBO’s bilingual horror comedy series Los Espookys (2019) and Manuel Puig’s novel, El beso de la mujer araña (1976), I argue that it is necessary to move beyond a speaker– audience dialectic, as in traditional storytelling, and towards transmediated activity, where static or linear temporal and spatial orders are both reproduced and subverted. By converging media studies with border studies and theorizations of translation and mobility, this article counters assumptions about submissive viewership while unpacking the political utility of entertainment.
Why is it important?
This study challenges what it means to be a ‘storyteller’ and moreover, what constitutes a useful ‘story’ in the context of political advocacy and activism. I argue that pop culture – mass entertainment – can be redeployed alongside the avant-garde, and not merely read, but acted out, as a form of transgressive politics. Transmediation as an alternative framework for coproduction and as a creative strategy rooted in performance, wish fulfilment, and improvisation reverses the binary logic of the original and its copies.