A01=Gloria Shin
American Empire
Author_Gloria Shin
Category=ATC
Category=ATFA
Category=JBCC1
Category=JBSF1
Celebrity
Classical Hollywood Cinema
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Film Theory
Performance
Postcolonial Studies
Richard Burton
Stardom
Product details
- ISBN 9781666907476
- Weight: 494g
- Dimensions: 156 x 237mm
- Publication Date: 15 Feb 2023
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the eponymous movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful and famous woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation films in the 1950s, via her extra-cinematic image as an exoticized jet-setting wanton seductress in the 1960s, through her repatriation to the U.S. and the election of her pro-military husband to the U.S. Senate in the 1970s, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.
Gloria Shin is full-time instructor in film, television, and media studies in the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University. She is a media consultant whose work has been featured on NPR and in the Los Angeles Times.
