American Cosmopolitans: Tourism, Empire, and Blockbuster Film
Date of Award
5-11-2025
Date Published
June 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English
Advisor(s)
Will Scheibel
Keywords
Blockbuster;Cosmopolitanism;Empire;Tourism;Travel;Ugly American
Abstract
This dissertation investigates representations of American tourists traveling abroad in popular American films and serial publications from 1945 to present. Such representations have produced an ideology of “American cosmopolitanism,” a term I use to describe an American national identity that is conspicuously connected to and knowledgeable about the world but firmly rooted in American exceptionalism. While it is common to define the “cosmopolitan” by its opposition to the national, American cosmopolitanism contradictorily maintains both identities, indicating that to be American is to be already global. I argue that the naturalization of this American cosmopolitanism with references to the innocence, ruggedness, and multiculturalism of the American tourist have played a key role in the ideological formation of contemporary American empire. By articulating the historical roots of American cosmopolitanism through the visible but undertheorized archive of the Hollywood blockbuster, I track how the tension between American cosmopolitanism and nationalism has been represented and mitigated through the figure of the American tourist. With particular attention given to the pejorative stereotype of the “Ugly American” and the various rhetorical moves that filmmakers and cultural critics have used to distance the American tourist from it, I analyze how cinematic representations have interfaced with larger cultural and political concerns like the postwar Marshall Plan, the late-Cold War “Vietnam Syndrome,” and contemporary neoliberal fantasies of transforming space into time. As such, this dissertation contributes to three scholarly areas at the intersections of American Studies and Film and Media Studies: the representation of the global within cinema, the influence of popular media on national identity, and the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism within the figure of the tourist.
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Recommended Citation
Caskie, Dylan Cannada, "American Cosmopolitans: Tourism, Empire, and Blockbuster Film" (2025). Dissertations - ALL. 2136.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2136
