Zoe Saldana or Zoë Saldaña?: cinematic dominicanidad and the Hollywood star

ABSTRACT

This article investigates Dominican cinematic celebrity through the eyes of the Dominican community based on the findings from my New York City ethnographic fieldwork. Investigating the ways in which audiences interpret actress Zoe Saldana in roles and her star text, my research focused on star–audience relationships and the role of such relationships in the articulation of a Dominican-American identity. Furthermore, this article frames audience responses to Saldana in terms of Dominican authenticity, cultural trust, and the post-racial raced body. Building on star/celebrity studies scholarship alongside scholarship rooted in critical race theory, I contend that Saldana is perceived as sacrificing potential Dominican-American identification and fandom in exchange for mainstream Hollywood success. By self-fashioning her star text as a moving target, Saldana has created role flexibility while simultaneously serving as a synecdoche of the mediated invisibility of dominicanidad.

KEYWORDS:

• Stars
• dominicanidad
• star–audience relationship
• identity
• Zoe Saldana

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mary Beltrán, Janet Staiger, Joe Straubhaar, Shanti Kumar, Maria Franklin, Alfred Martin, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable insights on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interview conducted on 20 July 2013 with a Dominican-born woman in her early twenties.

2. As a social phenomenon, latinidad can be conceptualised as the ‘processes where Latino/a identities and cultural practices are contested and created in media, discourse, and public space’ (Guidotti-Hernández 2007, p. 212).

3. As Esteban Del Rio (2006, p. 394) explains, two discourses are at play in the construction of a pan-ethnic Latino imaginary: ‘First, a shared Latin American ancestry dominates as the most rudimentary unifying force. Second, and of greater consequence, is the shared experience of being read as Latina/o in everyday culture. The denotative markers of complexion, accent, or surname mark us as Latinas/os’.

4. Clifford Geertz (1973), as a critical proponent of the turn to reflexivity in Anthropology, proffered the approach of ‘thick description’ as a means to do anthropology in a way that is more reflective and requires less direct interpretive framing by the anthropologist.

5. As the spelling of Saldana’s name is inconsistent. I use the unaccented spelling ‘Zoe Saldana’ throughout this article because this is the spelling used in her professional life. While this is done as an attempt to remain neutral and to avoid imposing a subjectivity onto her, I do acknowledge that this decision is not entirely politically neutral and can be read as potentially problematic.

6. Interview conducted on 18 June 2013 with a Dominican-born woman in her early twenties.

7. Interview conducted on 10 June 2013 with a US-born woman in her mid-twenties.

8. Interview conducted on 7 June 2013 with a Dominican-born US citizen in her mid-twenties.

9. Interview conducted on 11 June 2013 with US-born man in his late twenties.

10. Interview conducted on 10 July 2013 with US-born Dominican-American woman in her late twenties.

11. Interview conducted on 18 July 2013 with US-born woman in her early twenties.

12. Interview conducted on 6 June 2013 with Dominican-born US citizen in his early thirties.

13. Interview conducted on 11 June 2013 with 21-year-old US-born woman.

14. Interview conducted on 6 June 2013 with US-born Dominican-American in his early twenties.

15. Linguist Paul Baltes (1991, p. 75) posits that while proper names are primarily used to reference a specific individual(s), to denote them in semiological terms, they function on another level of signification where ‘names suggest descriptions regardless of their referential function’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keara K. Goin

Keara Goin recently earned her PhD in the Department of Radio–Television–Film at the University of Texas at Austin, where she served as the instructor of Race, Ethnicity and the Media. She received her Masters in Anthropology at the University of South Carolina and has conducted fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and NYC as part of a continuing ethnographic study. A media studies scholar and visual anthropologist, her research interests focus on the role of media in identity negotiation in the Dominican Republic and the Dominican Diaspora, media-based racialisation of Afro-Latina/os within the US, and the intersections of race and gender.