The American Abroad

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, >In The American Abroad, Anna Cooper explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular-the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour-became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language.

Anna Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Theatre, Film, and Television, University of Arizona. 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 a volume, Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood, recently out from Wayne State University Press.

Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: Cinema, Empire, and the "American Century" 1. The Sublime: Urban Ruins from Nazism to the Cold War 2. The Ethnographic: Imperialist Nostalgia and the American Technological Gaze 3. The Picturesque: Italian Landscape Views and the American Female Gaze 4. Glamour: The Necropolitics of Women's Fashion, from the Bombshell to the Princess Conclusion Bibliography Index