This book focuses on popular-cultural representations and appropriations across national borders of the celebrity that came to Elián González, the six-year old Cuban boy at the centre of a famously hypermediated custody battle in 1999/2000, a celebrity status that has continued to evolve in the decades since. The book explores the multivalent manufacture of Elián as a cause célèbre and a contested icon, the literal stake in a range of struggles between virtue and virtuality. Problematizing concepts of nationality and national cultural typologies, the book traces Elián’s celebrity proliferation in, and beyond, the Cuban-US conflict in numerous works of popular culture. It proposes that the virtualized fate of Elián demands new analytical approaches to the intersections between celebrity manufacture, the ‘archive’ and how it is understood, and the unruly place of Latinx subjects in the transnational and transcultural operations of popular culture and media industries. The book will be of interest to readers in Latinx Studies, Latin American Studies, Popular Cultural Studies, Media Studies and Celebrity Studies.

Paul Allatson, PhD, is a cultural studies scholar and industry fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, who has published widely in the areas of Latinx and transamerican cultural studies, postcolonial theory, sexuality studies, media studies, and literary and performance studies. Among many publications, he is the author of Latino Dreams: Transcultural Traffic and the U.S. National Imaginary (2002), and Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies (2007), and is co-editor (with Jo McCormack) of Exile Cultures, Misplaced Identities (2008) and (with Elaine Jeffreys) Celebrity Philanthropy (2015). Paul is the founding editor of the multilingual PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies.