Essays On Blackface Minstrelsy

Adding to the scholarship on animation industrialization and the role of self-reflexive gestures within cartoons, Sammond links these familiar tropes to blackface minstrelsy.

Adding to the scholarship on animation industrialization and the role of self-reflexive gestures within cartoons, Sammond links these familiar tropes to blackface minstrelsy.

The Introduction traces the history of blackface minstrelsy through three distinct moments in American film from the early twentieth century to our contemporary day.

By highlighting the persistence of blackface minstrelsy in American culture, this long view helps place the discussion of animation within a wider cultural context.

Giggie, University of Alabama Grace Elizabeth Hale, University of Virginia Robert Jackson, University of Tulsa David Krasner, Emerson College Thomas Riis, University of Colorado at Boulder Stephen Robertson, University of Sydney John Stauffer, Harvard University Graham White, University of Sydney Shane White, University of Sydney “Recommended.

All levels/libraries.”--Choice “These essays do genuinely deepen our understanding of black participation in the burgeoning consumer culture of America. underscoring the role of African Americans in the making of American modernity.”--Southern Historian “[Brundage] has edited this timely volume with authority and thoroughness.”--North Carolina Historical Review "This volume is a rich synthesis of the history of African Americans and mass culture from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s.

It also gives the reader, perhaps more familiar with the history of animation than with minstrelsy, a primer in its forms and iterations.

This ambition will make the Introduction useful for teaching subjects related to American racialized performance outside of animation per se, and especially for understanding contemporary iterations of blackface performance and their sheen of irony. While the relationship between blackface minstrelsy and humor permeates the whole book, Sammond gives it special focus in the conclusion.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 License.Please contact [email protected] use this work in a way not covered by the license.In this elegantly written, complex, and multifaceted tour de force, Sammond has given us a historically grounded and theoretically attuned analysis of blackface animation and its persistent uses, which runs throughout the history of moving images.Sammond’s crucial intervention, as with Taylor’s reading of the racial structures in [C]ommercial animation in the United States didn’t borrow from blackface minstrelsy, nor was it simply influenced by it.Indeed, he explicitly builds his analysis from the presumptive position of a critical observer: for example, looking at recurrent characters such as Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, Sammond asks, “why the gloves?” The answer, of course, has to do with minstrelsy, even if it was not explicitly labeled as such. In a moment where the status of the book as an object is in question, Sammond helpfully provides online access to a rich archive of cartoons, allowing the reader to directly and immediately engage with all of the works he discusses through the book’s digital companion (.For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.Indeed, Taylor argued that the film’s racial politics held the key to its formal mastery, undercutting the often-taught position that Griffith’s technological achievements could be discussed in isolation from its objectionable representation of African Americans. “The Re-birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema” gave the field an accessible, concrete, and eminently teachable way to approach Griffith’s epic in all of its complexities without having to make excuses for or ignore key aspects of its significance.takes a “bad object”—in this case, blackface minstrelsy—and details its centrality to the rise of early American animation and, by extension, the development of the national film industry more broadly.Indeed, even if it garners no mention (an absence that reads as a deliberate gesture, given the book’s evocative title, and one that has a lexical effect that parallels the “vestigial minstrels” of his study).