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White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals

Online ISBN:
9781452945880
Print ISBN:
9780816645848
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

White Gypsies: Race and Stardom in Spanish Musicals

Published online:
24 August 2015
Published in print:
15 February 2012
Online ISBN:
9781452945880
Print ISBN:
9780816645848
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Little has been written about the Spanish film musical, a genre usually associated with the early Franco dictatorship and dismissed by critics as reactionary, escapist fare. A timely and valuable corrective, this book shows how the Spanish folkloric musical films of the 1940s and 1950s are inextricably tied to anxious concerns about race—especially, but not only, Gypsiness. Focusing on the processes of identity formation in twentieth-century Spain—with multifaceted readings of the cinematic construction of class, gender, and sexuality—this book explores how these popular films allowed audiences to negotiate and imaginatively, at times problematically, resolve complex social contradictions. The interweaving of race and modernity is particularly evident in the book’s scrutiny of a striking popular phenomenon: how the musicals progressively whitened their stars, even as their storylines became increasingly Andalusianized and Gypsified.

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