‘We are not calling her Italian’: narratives and images of ethnic incorporation in Isa Miranda’s American persona
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Antonella Palmieri*aa School of Film & Media, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UKAntonella Palmieri is senior lecturer in Film, TV and Media at the University of Lincoln. Her research is concerned with the politics of gender, sexual and ethnic representations in Hollywood cinema and American and British Television. She has contributed to The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films (Routledge 2014) and to Stars in World Cinema: Screen Icons and Star Systems across Cultures (I.B. Tauris 2015). Recently, she published ‘Sophia Loren and the healing power of female Italian ethnicity in Grumpier Old Men’, in L. Bolten et al., eds. Lasting Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (Palgrave Macmillan 2016). Her current project focuses on the construction of Virna Lisi’s star image, anti-feminist narratives and the emergent women’s liberation movement for gender equality in mid-1960s American society.CONTACT Antonella Palmieri [email protected] article discusses the impact of Hollywood standards of homogenisation on Isa Miranda’s cosmopolitan appeal during her work for Paramount. The article suggests that Miranda’s American image was constructed in an attempt to establish her as a Marlene Dietrich type in order to defuse the potential threat represented by her ethnic Otherness; meanwhile, the Italian actress was framed within film narratives that played out (albeit indirectly) an idealised conception of successful American assimilation of European immigrants. In the process, Miranda was visually constructed through images that effectively ‘whitened’ her, and her Italianness was thus displaced onto an ideal of Northern European whiteness that bespoke a desire to reassert whiteness as the norm in 1930s America.
Source: Celebrity Studies
Author: Antonella Palmieri
Institution: University of Lincoln
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2952799050