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Welcome to an X-ray of Toontown, its Bones showing. Minstrelsy has sometimes seemed the skeleton in the closet of American animation, its racist tar coons hiding inside our most beloved cartoons Felix, Mickey, Bugs, Daffy, and a host of others both before and after them. With sweeping erudition and definitive archival and theoretical diagnoses, Nicholas Sammond shows just how pervasively blackface figurations have formed the backbone of our animated fantasy lives. Modern cartoons don t merely nod to nineteenth-century blackface performance, Sammond establishes, they constitute its afterlife. --Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

With Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond demonstrates that the specter of racialized caricature and its attending performative power dynamics have a longer and more pernicious continuum through which race, industry, and the nation understood and affected one another. -- Allyson Nadia Field * Media Industries Journal * Birth of an Industry offers a timely, valuable, and theoretically distinguished intervention. -- Malcolm Cook * Animation * Sammond's work in The Birth of An Industry is notable and fascinating. . . . By unpacking each component of the production and representation of minstrel animation, Sammond builds the space needed for an insightful discussion. -- Niamh Timmons * Journal of Popular Culture * Few authors . . . have proved minstrelsy's connections to early animation as carefully and convincingly as Nicholas Sammond in his thoughtful text Birth of an Industry. -- Carmenita Higginbotham * Journal of Southern History * Moving effortlessly among theories of comedy, critical race theory, performance studies, animation criticism, and both Marxist and Freudian analyses, Sammond has produced a comprehensive study of the rise of American animation. -- Diego A. Millan * Studies in American Humor * Sammond's impressive Birth of an Industry condenses and stretches various links among the evolving art, labor, and business of early animated film. -- T. Lindvall * Choice * Birth of an Industry is a welcome addition and valuable contribution to the ongoing academic discussion of the relationship of ethnic tensions to the art and business of animation. -- Christopher P. Lehman * African American Review * Nicholas Sammond's study provides a detailed, thoughtful, exhaustively researched examination of the process by which the early animation studios cast about for technical and semiotic models to inform their new art form and drew upon the complex and conflicted vocabulary of blackface minstrelsy to do so. -- Christopher J. Smith * Journal of American History *

Welcome to an X-ray of Toontown, its Bones showing. Minstrelsy has sometimes seemed the skeleton in the closet of American animation, its racist tar coons hiding inside our most beloved cartoons--Felix, Mickey, Bugs, Daffy, and a host of others both before and after them. With sweeping erudition and definitive archival and theoretical diagnoses, Nicholas Sammond shows just how pervasively blackface figurations have formed the backbone of our animated fantasy lives. Modern cartoons don't merely nod to nineteenth-century blackface performance, Sammond establishes, they constitute its afterlife. --Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

Author Information

Nicholas Sammond is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-60, and the editor of Steel Chair to the Head: Essays on Professional Wrestling, both also published by Duke University Press.

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