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. 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.