Summary

Part V continues with a chapter titled “Meet Justin Bieber!” In it, Smith uses Justin Bieber to think through the idea of personhood and celebrity. She imagines a meeting between Bieber, a global pop star, and Martin Buber, a long-dead Jewish philosopher. In Buber’s famous 1923 essay, “I and Thou,” he asks what it means to meet another person and posits two different modes of engagement with the world: “I-Thou” and “I-It.” “I-It” lands one in the realm of things, in which people become objects to experience.

Connecting this back to Justin Bieber, Smith notes that a Belieber’s meeting with Bieber is always already a “piece of narrative to be told and retold…and that Bieber himself, in his human reality, is barely involved, almost unnecessary” (386). Next, Smith analyzes the lyrics of Bieber...