Creating Carmen Miranda: Race, Camp, and Transnational Stardom by Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez (review)

Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez's Creating Carmen Miranda explores the creation, interpretation, and imitation of Carmen Miranda's image in 1930s Brazil, on Broadway, and in Hollywood, focusing on her star text at key moments in her career as a singer, and particularly as a film star. The author's stated intention is to analyze her performances, "grounding them in a broader social, political, and racial context" (4), and she clearly succeeds in doing so. This study is extensively researched, drawing on a range of archival material and narratives published in the mainstream and fan press, as well as on publicity and promotional material, including press books and film posters. It also effectively synthesizes existing academic writings on the Portugal-born Brazilian star.

Bishop-Sanchez begins by examining the figure of the baiana in Brazilian popular culture, illustrating how this persona—based on colonial-era Afro-Brazilian street vendors—was appropriated by Miranda in a display of "performative race" for both Brazilian and international audiences. Of particular interest to musicians and musicologists are the references to the star's use of "phonic signifiers of blackness" (55) in her singing style. When performing samba, the author argues that "these linguistic markers of race enabled her to Africanize and to authenticate her Afro-Brazilian song" (56).

The book identifies key moments when Miranda's use of a "performative wink"—the author's term—to the audience reveals the star's ability to be part of the performance and yet at once knowingly undermine it and call it into question. This idea is not new, but Bishop-Sanchez provides a wealth of illustrative examples. She adopts a pragmatic mixed methodology, which draws on camp theory; on the approaches of film, gender, and performance studies; and on thorough sociohistorical contextualization.

The author goes on to explore how the Hollywood studios marketed the star, and her relationships with consumer culture, especially fashion. Particularly interesting chapters analyze the camp aesthetic of Miranda's screen performances in Hollywood, providing a consummate analysis of the Busby Berkeley musical The Gang's All Here (1943)—which is described as being "the film that cemented Miranda's place in the camp hall of fame" (206)—and the appropriation of her image by gay, drag, and carnival cultures. Although these topics have been widely referenced in previous works on the star, Bishop-Sanchez's contribution is to explore an extensive corpus of Miranda impersonations; she has unearthed many little-known examples, and she provides an exhaustive overview of how the star has continued to be imitated, not least in children's cartoon TV programs. In relation to the star's Hollywood screen performances, the author concludes: "Whether on or off the proscenium stage in her films, Carmen Miranda is always a fashion spectacle. Camp pervades her performativity as she navigates between her on- and offstage theatricality, reinforced by dialogues that either she or her costars articulate and that translate her performative wink through a mixture of good-humored, ironic, and comical commentary on the artificiality of her screen persona" (141).

This book will appeal primarily to scholars and students of Latin American and specifically Brazilian culture, and to those working in the fields of film and performance studies more broadly. It provides useful background material that contextualizes Miranda's interpretation of the samba genre, but it is not a book about music. It is a welcome addition to the bibliography on the star in that it combines an academic approach with an accessible writing style, and it will thus also be of interest to a general readership. It is illustrated with numerous large black-and-white photographs, many of which have rarely, if ever, been reproduced in book form.