Bloomsbury Academic American Abroad, The: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema

An American Abroad reframes postcolonial film aesthetics through a close textual study of Hollywood films about European travel from the long 1950s. The heterogeneous cycle of films made from 1948 to 1964 that depict Americans traveling in contemporary Europe portray a complex and fraught cultural encounter between American hegemonic power and a Europe that is being economically, socially and culturally dominated from across the Atlantic. Dr. Anna Cooper explores how discourses of European travel – Parisian shopping trips, Roman holidays, Berlin political intrigues and so on – are harnessed in service of American domination, often positioning America as the benevolent savior of postwar Europe, although this positioning is also often problematized by various details of the films, or resisted through a European actor’s performance. By exploring a mix of European locations and Hollywood genres, Cooper’s study opens up a plethora of theoretical and aesthetic considerations in their approaches to the colonial text: orientalism, gaze theory, the picturesque, the sublime, the ethnographic, and theories of space/place/the urban, among others. Review In this eloquent and erudite exploration of an imperial Hollywood that framed and edited images of Europe for domestic consumption, Anna Cooper forensically shows the reader how to follow an untrustworthy tour guide. --Peter Stanfield, Emeritus Professor of Film, University of Kent, UK The American Abroad offers a detailed and complex view of American imperialism using the institution of Hollywood cinema for fostering cultural dominance over Europe. Anna Cooper foregrounds the figure of the tourist to unravel in nuanced detail just how Hollywood’s utopian aesthetics “outrageously” depicts Europe as its Orientalist Other on screen. With rich textual analyses of a specific corpus of Post-War films set in Europe, The American Abroad forms an important contribution to the renewed interest in Transatlantic cinematic encounters. --Jeroen Gerrits, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, Binghamton University (SUNY), USA and author of Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns The American Abroad addresses the complex ideological relationship between the U.S. and Europe through a lively and attentive analysis of postwar Hollywood cinema’s visual strategies. By illuminating the ways that the “dream factory” imagined a Europe that exists primarily for the white traveler, Cooper’s study contributes to a richer understanding of U.S. imperialism and its cinematic narratives. --Peter Limbrick, Professor of Film and Digital Media, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA and author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema About the Author Anna Cooper is Assistant 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).