Anna Reynolds Cooper

Interests

No activities entered.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Cooper, A. R. (2022). The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema. Bloomsbury.
  More info

  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 providing 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? 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
• Cooper, A. R., & Meeuf, R. (2017). Projecting the World: Representing the Foreign in Classical Hollywood. Wayne State University Press.
  More info

  The classical Hollywood films that were released between the 1930s and 1960s were some of the most famous products of global trade, crisscrossing borders and rising to international dominance. In analyzing a series of Hollywood films that illustrate moments of nuanced transnational engagement with the "foreign," Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood enriches our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema as a locus of imaginative geographies that explore the United States’ relationship with the world. While previous scholarship has asserted the imperialism and racism at the core of classical Hollywood cinema, Anna Cooper and Russell Meeuf’s collection delves into the intricacies—and sometimes disruptions—of this assumption, seeing Hollywood films as multivalent and contradictory cultural narratives about identity and politics in an increasingly interconnected world.Projecting the World illustrates how Hollywood films negotiate shifting historical contexts of internationalization through complex narratives about transnational exchange—a topic that has thus far been neglected in scholarship on classical Hollywood. The essays analyze the "foreign" with topics such as the 1930s island horror film, the 1950s Mexico-set bullfighting film, Hollywood’s projection of "exoticism" on Argentina, and John Wayne’s film sets in Africa. Against the backdrop of expanding consumer capitalism and the growth of U.S. global power, Hollywood films such as Tarzan and Anatahan, as well as musicals about Paris, offered resonant images and stories that dramatized America’s international relationships in complicated ways.A fascinating exploration of an oft-overlooked aspect of classical Hollywood films, Projecting the World offers a series of striking new analyses that will entice cinema lovers, film historians, and those interested in the history of American neocolonialism.

Chapters

• Cooper, A. R. (2018). Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the U.S. Indie Road Movie. In Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics and Aesthetics. Edinburgh University Press.
• Cooper, A. R. (2017). ‘Our Love Is Here to Stay’: Transatlantic Relations in 1950s Hollywood Musicals About Paris. In Projecting the World: Representing the Foreign in Classical Hollywood(pp 159-180). Wayne State University Press.
• Cooper, A. R., & Meeuf, R. (2017). Introduction: Classical Hollywood and Transnational Culture. In Projecting the World: Representing the “Foreign” in Classical Hollywood(pp 1-21). Wayne State University Press.

Journals/Publications

• Cooper, A. R. (2019). A New Feminist Critique of Film Canon: Moving Beyond the Diversity/Inclusion Paradigm in the Digital Era. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 36(5), 392-413.
• Cooper, A. R. (2019). Guest editor for special issue "Cinema and the Cultures of Neoliberalism". New Review of Film and Television Studies, 17(3).
• Cooper, A. R. (2019). Neoliberal Theory and Film Studies. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 17(3), 265-277.
  More info

  This article has received a notably high number of page views - currently at over 6100 (as of January 2022). It is one of the most-read articles ever to appear in this journal.
• Cooper, A. R. (2016). Colonizing Europe: Widescreen aesthetics in the 1950s' American travel film. Transnational Cinemas, 7(1), 21-33.
• Cooper, A. R. (2015). America’s Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting. Film-Philosophy, 19, 270-288.

Presentations

• Cooper, A. R. (2022, April). The Bombshell and the Princess: The Geopolitics of Mid-Century Hollywood Glamour. Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference. Chicago.
• Cooper, A. R. (2019, March). Transforming Race: Neoliberal Whiteness in Transformers and Harry Potter. Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference. Seattle.
• Cooper, A. R. (2018, March). A new feminist critique of film canon: Moving beyond liberalism in the digital era. Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference. Toronto.
• Cooper, A. R. (2017, July). Spaces of failure: Women and neoliberal mobilities in the U.S. indie road movie. Screen conference. Glasgow, Scotland.

Others

• Cooper, A. R. (2019, March). Organized panel: "Neoliberal Cultural Transformations and Contemporary Cinema". Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference.
• Cooper, A. R. (2017, July). Organized panel: "Cinema and the Cultures of Neoliberalism". Screen conference.