Cinematic Geographies and Multicultural Spectatorship in America

Exploration, intertwined with home-seeking, has always defined America. Geographic variation and a mobile populace have meant that America is always searching for a home, yet in love with travel. Here, Corbin argues that a wide swath of films about significant cultural landscapes in America evoke a sense of travel for their viewers, just by going to the movie theatre. She considers the dialectic between the thrill of seeing an "other" place and the security of being in a "familiar" place. The sum total of these virtual travel experiences from the mid-1970s through the 1990s built a societal map of "popular multiculturalism" - of various landscapes in relation to each other - through a movie-going experience that combined middlebrow entertainment with moderate-to-liberal politics.

Amy Corbin is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication and Acting Director of Film Studies at Muhlenberg College, USA.