Fictions of faraway places: Travel, exoticism, and cinema from high imperialism to global culture

This dissertation interrogates how cinema functions as a form of knowledge of cultural difference by proposing, first, a reconsideration of the early history of cinema in terms of how the filmic representation of faraway lands was implicated in the literal traversal of space in geopolitical expansion. I draw upon the cultural and political history of the U.S., studies of early cinema, and postcolonial theory to argue that cinema enabled an effective visual appropriation of the world at a historic moment of conquest. Chapter One situates the emergence of cinema in the U.S. within the visual culture of the turn of the century, and in relation to practices of overseas imperialism and colonial conquest in Asia and the Pacific region. Chapter Two considers the early work of the popular American illustrated travel lecturer E. Burton Holmes, in particular his lectures on Japan, China, Hawai'i, and the Philippines, as specific examples of how the new technology of cinema, combined with the existing conventions of travel narratives, could be marshaled to legitimate a particular view of the world.;The second part of the dissertation focuses on different aspects of travel---as the circulation of images, ideas, people, and capital---in an examination of contemporary cinema and global culture. In this section I also call attention to intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and nation at the level of the subject, thus shifting the focus from the commerce between nations to questions of intersubjective identity and difference. Chapter Three analyzes the production, marketing, and reception of The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, 1987) as a virtual voyage to China and the Forbidden City. Chapter Four demonstrates how David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly (1993) highlights the contradiction between a faith in the objective nature of the cinematic apparatus, or film as a form of knowledge, and the necessarily subjective nature of perception, or seeing as socially determined. Chapter Five returns to the U.S. context in an analysis of The Wedding Banquet (Lee, 1993) in relation to questions of travel and the deterritorializations of contemporary global culture.