Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy

Abstract Indian novelist and Booker winner Arundhati Roy is a celebrity author, but her celebrityhood is a cross-genre and cross-domain one. This essay argues that a certain insurgent celebrityhood emerges in the case of Roy through her mobility into and across many public domains. In this process of mobility, Roy also mobilises in her rhetoric and her polemics, the precariat public sphere by her participation in it. There is, first her generic mobility (across genres). Then, Roy moves from the cosmopolitan domain to the vernacular when she employs her cosmopolitan cultural capital of the English language, but also political ideas of citizenship, in order to alter her vernacularisation. Third, Roy’s activism enables her mobilisation of “insurgents,” those with political views opposed to the state’s and involved with social justice struggles.