Anna Reynolds Cooper

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Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Cooper, A. (2022). The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc..
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  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? 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. (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.
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  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.
• Cooper, A., & 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. (2018). Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the US Indie Road Movie. In Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics. Edinburgh University Press.
• 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. (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. Wayne State 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. (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(Issue 5). doi:10.1080/10509208.2019.1590175
• Cooper, A. (2019). Neoliberal theory and film studies. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 17(Issue 3). doi:10.1080/17400309.2019.1622877
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  Neoliberalism, in imposing ‘free market’ principles on all areas of life, transforms older configurations of the self, society, culture, aesthetics, and the relationships between them; it has increasingly been theorized as fundamentally breaking with liberal and humanist values in place since the Enlightenment. This introduction to the special issue on Neoliberal Cultural Transformations assesses existing scholarship on neoliberalism and cinema and points to new paths forward. It provides an overview of neoliberal theory from the social sciences, including the Marxist approach of theorists such as David Harvey as well as political approaches like the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown, and Philip Mirowski. I find that most work in film studies thus far has followed in the vein of Marxist theory, concerning itself almost exclusively with considerations of economics. Although the best of this work is compelling, I argue that the field of film studies is overdue for an exploration of political and biopolitical theories of neoliberalism and their connections to film texts. This is a two-way street; neoliberal theory needs film studies just as much as the converse, as cinema can offer unique insights into neoliberal transformations of the subject, society, culture, and aesthetics.
• 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.
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  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., & Meeuf, R. (2017). Introduction: Classical hollywood and transnational culture. Projecting the World: Representing the "Foreign" in Classical Hollywood.
• Cooper, A. R. (2016). Colonizing Europe: Widescreen aesthetics in the 1950s' American travel film. Transnational Cinemas, 7(1), 21-33.
• Cooper, A. R. (2016). Colonizing Europe: Widescreen aesthetics in the 1950s’ American travel film. Transnational Cinemas, 7(Issue 1). doi:10.1080/20403526.2016.1140960
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  This article uses textual methodologies adapted from postcolonial studies to explore the colonialist aesthetics of mid-century American cinema. It focuses on This is Cinerama (Merian C. Cooper, independent, 1952) and Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco, Fox, 1954)-two films with early widescreen formats that engage with the technoaesthetic tradition of the silent film travelogue, and that depict European space. These films confer power and metropole status not simply on the West but specifically on America, performing an imaginative act of appropriation of European space and culture. This is Cinerama engages with the long tradition of ethnographic cinema, mobilizing tropes of the racialized other in representing Europeans and constructing a mapping of European space that centres on the controlling gaze of the white American man. Three Coins deploys the colonial aesthetic tradition of the picturesque and its haptic corollary, the stroll, as a mode for managing the Italian landscape. It depicts a colonized Italian society in which both the white American woman’s sexual purity or ‘safety’ and her liberation from patriarchal constraints are paradoxically used to justify a ‘benevolent’ American imperialism. Because these films mobilize these colonial aesthetics in favour of a specifically American metropole, they trouble the notion that America and Europe constitute a single entity (‘the West’) within colonial discourse, manifesting rather the complicated and fraught power dynamics between the two that arose in the post-war period. The article thus makes a case for the centrality of the American film text both to studies of American imperialism and to studies of colonial aesthetics more generally.
• Cooper, A. (2015). America’s Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting -. Film-Philosophy, 19(Issue 1). doi:10.3366/film.2015.0015
• 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.