The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema - Paperback

by Anna Cooper (Author)

Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style, and thus provides a new and unique perspective on the origins of the cinematic gaze. Classical Hollywood cinema constructs global spaces as an imaginative dreamworld,
subsuming geographical and cultural differences into utopian fantasy. Yet, this characteristically Hollywoodian aesthetic has rarely been explored in detail. How are such representations constructed within film texts? Is this utopian aesthetic really as uniform and transparent as it appears? What is its relationship to the United States' status as an imperial power?

Author Biography

Anna Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona, USA. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick and has worked at the universities of Hertfordshire, Sussex, and California (Santa Cruz). She co-edited Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood (2017).