Description:
- First book-length broad study of stardom in Brazilian cinema in either Portuguese or English.
- Its historical scope makes it particularly important - the chapters cover the evolution of stardom as a phenomenon in Brazilian cinema from the silent era to the present day.
- Its combination of chapters on the phenomenon of stardom and its mechanisms, alongside chapters that study in depth individual stars.
Brief description:
Lisa Shaw is Reader in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is author of The Social History of the Brazilian Samba (1999) and Carmen Miranda (2013). She is currently completing a monograph entitled Tropical Travels: Brazilian Popular Performance, 'Race' and Transnational Encounters, 1880s-1950s, for which she was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship.
Review Quotes:
"The volume embraces diverse and nuanced approaches to stardom...; all [contributors] succeed in putting their findings into readable prose. A thorough scholarly apparatus is included. The volume represents a major contribution to star studies." - Choice
"This is [a] rich text which examines a diverse range of Brazilian stars across different time periods, genres and media platforms. Furthermore, with authors employing a wide range of approaches incorporating race, sexuality, age and gender, this volume collectively adds a new wealth of knowledge to the study of global cinematic stardom, thus far underrepresented in film scholar- ship. The set of images highlighting key performers and performances readers may be unfamiliar with is also a nice touch which adds to the overall appeal of the book." - Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
"The strength and originality of this tightly edited volume lie in its historical perspective and comprehensiveness. Each chapter works well on its own, but also forms part of a larger design, and the editors have done an excellent job in mapping the terrain of stardom in Brazil over a century. I know of no other volume, focused on the cinemas of Latin America, that attempts the same chronological range, from early cinema to the present day." - John King, University of Warwick