Introduction: Navigating with the Blackstar: the Mediality of David Bowie

Despite the death of David Jones, David Bowie continues to shine with a distinctive luminosity and navigational function. He shines in absence and in repetition in various venues, as on a wall in Turnpike Lane. Our approach to this special issue of Celebrity Studies is framed by the idea that a social, cultural, ideological and semiotic understanding of stardom is entirely fitting for an examination of David Bowie and his legacy. Building on previous research on Bowie’s star personae (Stevenson 2006, Cinque and Redmond 2014, Cinque et al. 2015), this framework can be further inflected by considering the cosmological significance of stars in relation to Bowie. For instance, stars provide constellations of perpetual guiding points which enable enlightened communities to navigate pathways. Stars also have a spectral dimension, since they are luminous, but not always visible. Stars might seem static and omnipresent, but they are constantly transforming, changing appearance, ageing, living and dying. As Bowie has so aptly emphasised in his lyrics and interviews, there are many different types of stars (including his contentious statement that ‘Adolf Hitler was the first pop star’), and it was important that he set the record straight about which type of star he is: ‘… not a film star… not a pop star… not a marvel star… not a gang-star… I’m a star’s star… I’m a black star’.