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...