Carmen miranda between the desires of two nations

This exhibition aims at exploring Carmen Miranda’s characters in cinema, connected to national projects in two moments of her career:  the Brazilian moment, featuring the Baiana, and the international moment, with her Hollywood Latin-American characters. I propose demonstrating how her characters reassign a colonial desire representing a national (Brazilian) identity or a regional (Latin-American) identity. This presentation makes use of film analysis paired with social-historical analysis, using bibliographic and documental research, linking her representations with power relationships and political interests in both national and international contexts. A contrastive approach is used in both contexts, exploring Miranda’s life and her constitutive shifts. The focus is on the cultural and political character of the national and regional identities alongside with their tensions and ambiguities. In a Post-Colonial approach, I intent to examine the intersection of the following categories: race, gender and sexuality in the representations of nation and region.

After the Brazilian movie Banana da Terra (1939), Carmen Miranda incorporated the character of Baiana in her performances, one of the crucial figures of national narratives that combine sensuality, blackness and femininity. This character is an actualization of the “mulata” figure (a racially hybrid woman), whom, in the Brazilian imaginary would associate herself with a white man to create a “whiter” nation. In a specific form of manipulating racial tensions and miscegenation, Carmen Miranda represented the possibility of valorizing a national identity that was characterized in that period as a “racial democracy” and, concomitantly, made-up by the nation’s wishes of a white future, as of the Baiana’s whiteness interpretation. When Carmen Miranda moved to the USA, she became the stereotype of a Latin-American woman. Nicknamed “Brazilian Bombshell” and representing several Latin-Americans characters in cinema, Carmen Miranda means in the USA the actualization of colonial desire: a feminine, racialized and sexualized representation of Latin-America.