Schwarzenegger

“This is an impressive work that will make innovative contributions to the fields of star studies, cultural studies, aural diversity, sound studies, world cinema studies, and many other fields.”

-- David Greven, Professor of English, University of South Carolina, USA

This book analyses the uses of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a foreign star in Hollywood through a film philosophical, de-westernizing and sonic critical framework. It offers very close readings of the film texts, of the roles Schwarzenegger performs, and the rhetorical strategies he adopts outside his film performances to show that in spite of attempts to occupy the position of an emblematic member of the U.S. national body Schwarzenegger remains irrevocably outside as an accented migrant body continuously accumulating markers of belonging that by their very necessity attest to their insufficiency. The book’s central project is to trace back, from the uses to which a migrant star such as Schwarzenegger is put on the screen, the construction of a sense or idea of a U.S. national community through the cinema. Given that the appeal to the American myth of an immigrant nation that promises to erase difference is fundamental to the Schwarzenegger star persona, the central aim of this book is to explore the uses of his stardom as an embodiment of the promise of America and its contradictions and exclusions.

Gábor Gergely works at the University of Lincoln, UK. His research applies a de-westernizing method to questions of belonging and exclusion within the framework of trans/national cinema and star studies. He has published monographs on émigré actors in Hollywood and on Hungarian production history and antisemitism. He edited Stars and Stardom in Eastern European Cinemas (2022) and co-edited The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (2022).