What has age got to do with fame?
In 2020, netizens were excited when Ace actor Jude Chukwuka sang Naira Marley’s song during the lockdown. Fast forward to 2021, when the one-time agile, dynamic, now gracefully older and fragile video of Olu Jacob’s appearance at Lifetime Achievement Awards at AFRIFF emerged online, there was a mixed reaction. Later, I watched a portion of his amiable’s wife Joke Sylvia’s interview with Media Guru Chude Jidewon. This morning I saw the pictures of his 80th birthday.
At my panel of fame and fandom: African celebrities in Historical and Contemporary Perspective at the 6th Lagos Studies Association, I shared possible areas of research in African celebrity studies - an expansive field in Europe and North America. The question of age and aging was one of them. To be sure, I am not using Europe Americans as a standard or judge of Africanist scholarship.
However, I am interested in how fame or infamy helps us understand age and ageism? How has a transformation in society, culture, digital media, religion, gender, and generation impacted, shaped, and influenced conversation about aging? Are there scholars in medicine, science, history, economics, psychology, sociology, and more who can help us understand this? Do young people” hate” old people? Though as a daughter born to a handsome older man in his old age, I cringe at the insensitivity of some conversation about Olu jacobs, yet as a scholar, I have to suspend judgment reflexes to ask what is interesting, revealing, significant, and strange about fame and aging. Strange here connotes what is not readily explainable. It is the things that are hidden in plain sight among others that will, along with others, distinguish celebrity studies from gossip, blogs, and other non-academic conversation.do location, race, social economics, class, and other identity markers. What makes the aging of RMD admirable and another questioned? Is it about endearing, admiration, health, attractive masculinity, health or impairement?
Always your celebrity scholar in training.
Posted on Facebook on July 5, 2022.
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