Overview

The foreign ‘elsewhere’ has long been depicted in American cinema as a site of fascination and fantasy, shaping how Western audiences view the world. 'Elsewhere' in American Cinema explores how these portrayals have also created enduring stereotypes and reinforced troubling power dynamics, models and counter-models. Bringing together a diverse group of international contributors, the volume explores depictions of the ‘elsewhere’ across various genres including musicals, westerns, war films, and romantic comedies. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Michel Foucault’s heterotopias, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and Homi Bhabha’s concept of in-betweenness, the eleven chapters offer fresh perspectives on films spanning from the silent era to contemporary Hollywood. Through close readings of films such as The Fugitive (1947), America America (1963), and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), they analyse Hollywood’s emphasis on patriotism and its problematic portrayal of conflict zones, the role of music in exoticising foreign lands, and the evolution of stereotypes into counter-models. As a result, the cinematic 'elsewhere’ emerges as a complex space that is simultaneously real and constructed, familiar and alien, onto which American filmmakers project cultural anxieties, fantasies, and ideologies, revealing the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.

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9781350561953

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Author Information

Julie Assouly is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Université d’Artois, France. Her research focuses on American contemporary auteur cinema (the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson), the representation of the working class, and issues of intermediality and interculturality. She is the author of Wes Anderson, cinéaste transatlantique (2024) and the co-editor (with Marianne Kac-Vergne) of From the Margins to the Mainstream (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Esther Heboyan is Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Artois in Arras, France. She is a writer and journalist, and her publications on cinema include Les Variations Jarmusch (2017) and San Francisco mis en scenes (2018).

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