Hollywood's Other America: Neoliberalism, US Hegemony, and the Construction of an Imaginative Geography of the Americas in Contemporary US Film
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis explores the production of Latin America as a space in Hollywood films in the context of neoliberal hegemony and the shifting power relations of late capitalist globalization. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of 'imaginative geographies' I examine the way in which Hollywood representations of Latin America have constructed a spatio-temporal imaginative geography of the Americas that structures US knowledge of Latin America, arguing that these representations form part of a neocolonial discourse that legitimates neoliberal economic expansion and direct US military or political intervention in Latin America. In contemporary US film, this geographic imaginary is produced through representations of Latin America as an undeveloped and primitive, alternatively utopian or dystopian, space. In this way, these films also tend to reproduce the Enlightenment ideology of history as a progressive, ordered whole — albeit in a new postmodern form that constructs a split-temporality in which history has ended for the West while the rest of the world is conceived of as still existing in the linear, progressive time of Enlightenment historical rationality — and spatialize this linear temporality, creating the US as the telos of historical development and Latin America as existing in a state of stunted development in a pre-modern historical era.
abstract: This thesis explores the production of Latin America as a space in Hollywood films in the context of neoliberal hegemony and the shifting power relations of late capitalist globalization. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of 'imaginative geographies' I examine the way in which Hollywood representations of Latin America have constructed a spatio-temporal imaginative geography of the Americas that structures US knowledge of Latin America, arguing that these representations form part of a neocolonial discourse that legitimates neoliberal economic expansion and direct US military or political intervention in Latin America. In contemporary US film, this geographic imaginary is produced through representations of Latin America as an undeveloped and primitive, alternatively utopian or dystopian, space. In this way, these films also tend to reproduce the Enlightenment ideology of history as a progressive, ordered whole — albeit in a new postmodern form that constructs a split-temporality in which history has ended for the West while the rest of the world is conceived of as still existing in the linear, progressive time of Enlightenment historical rationality — and spatialize this linear temporality, creating the US as the telos of historical development and Latin America as existing in a state of stunted development in a pre-modern historical era.
author: Smith, Brent
language: English
keywords: Globalization, Neoliberalism, Latin America, Film, United States, Coloniality, Imaginative Geography
date published: 2011-07-02T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:26:07Z
provider: University of New Mexico
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of New Mexico

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1928/12829