The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema

By: Anna Cooper

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Synopsis: 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.