Review
2017; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/studamerhumor.3.1.0127
ISSN2333-9934
Autores ResumoIn his 2015 book Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, Nicholas Sammond surveys the evolving labor industry and cultural politics that brought cartoon characters such as Disney's Mickey Mouse and Warner Bros.' Daffy Duck to life during the early decades of the twentieth century. To do so, he places cartoon, animator, and industry in relation to the aesthetic practices of nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy. Not only did early twentieth-century American animation reflect nineteenth-century aesthetic practices instantiated and popularized by blackface, Sammond argues, but cartoons also “participated in … the racial formations of the day” (30). Rather than viewing classic cartoons as influenced by earlier entertainment genres rooted in racist ideologies, Sammond instead highlights the influence cartoons exerted over social and cultural formations at the time. In comparing American animation to the performative traditions of blackface minstrelsy, Sammond uncovers how the animation industry came to rely on the idea of the rebellious slave—“a living, breathing embodiment of property rebelling against the conditions of its existence”—popularized on the stage as the “fundamental template” in the production of cartoons' most recognizable products (32). Thus characters such as Mickey and Daffy are not simply offshoots of minstrelsy's tropes but are actually minstrels themselves. When the direct links to these earlier forms fade, these characters endure as what Sammond calls vestigial minstrels insofar as they “[carry] the tokens of blackface minstrelsy in their bodies and behaviors yet no longer immediately [signify] as such” (3).In addition to an introduction and conclusion, Birth of an Industry is divided into four chapters. To accompany the book's 130 black-and-white images, there is a link to an easily navigable online companion that features all discussed media. This resource not only adds to the experience of reading the book on one's own, but also creates an indispensable archive for animation scholars and for educators planning to use Birth of an Industry in the classroom. The first two chapters, “Performance” and “Labor,” elaborate the premise of his introduction, examining the history of early performing animators who worked as interlocutors for the audience, a role Sammond reads as analogous to the interlocutor of the minstrel stage. The push and pull of this dynamic would be reborn in two-man vaudeville acts and in the staged antagonisms between animator and his cartoon creation. Thus, not only do a cartoon character's white gloves and enlarged facial features indicate its representational debts to the visual/static signifiers of blackface, Sammond also convincingly locates the performative and dynamic tropes underlying both. “Labor” highlights how shifting labor relations, increasing production demands, and changing public perceptions about animation studios resulted in “the standardization of artists as workers” (89). Bringing these labor conditions in conversation with the focus of his book, Sammond reads the cartoon character's rebellious spirit as a manifestation of line animators' collective frustrations over their working conditions.Changes in the animator's relationship to his product not only affected labor relations, but also the representation of cartoons and space, which Sammond pursues further in his third chapter, “Space.” Technological innovations—including the introduction of sound to animation, for instance—intensified labor divisions and changed the infrastructure of the animation studio in ways that further distanced the animator from a finished cartoon. Moreover, 1930s cartoons began to rely more on “a unified cinematic space—an idea that the worlds depicted in movies were located elsewhere” (128). Sammond also considers how these changes affect spatial relations within theaters themselves. How cartoons negotiate ideas of space on the screens upon which they were projected, among audience members, and within theaters mattered significantly to how they regulated social formations, especially race.Chapter four, “Race,” delves further into social formations and shows how American racial matrices find expression beyond racist caricature, providing a fuller account of the nation's relationship to minstrelsy and its afterlives. An “eternal cavalcade of pain” remains inseparable from cartoon gags, in which the cartoon character is the impossibly resilient receptor for untold humiliation—twisting, stretching, melting, anvil-crushing, and so on (203). Insisting that we ask why this violence registers as funny, Sammond shows how these destructive acts visited upon the cartoon character often map onto social bodies marked by race, gender, sexuality, or ethnicity in ways that “[harmonize] social and physical violence” (203). The chapter deftly differentiates between the racial underpinnings of studio cartoon stars—the vestigial minstrel whose race remained obscured by the “plausible deniability of its being an anthropomorphic animal or a clown”—and racist caricatures deployed from the 1920s onward not as a means to exculpate the former but rather to show how both speak to white America's relationship to racial blackness (260). The caricatures emerge as a response to shifting race relations in the United States, in which the increased cultural expressions of African Americans conjured fears of actual challenges to the racialized social structures circumscribing black life. What had begun as early animation's “pantomime of the creature's rebellion against its creator” mutates into the literalized repression of Black expression in the form of racist caricatures in cartoons (260).For scholars interested in questions of humor, and why violence visited upon the cartoon elicits laughter, Sammond's conclusion, “The ‘New’ Blackface,” offers his most sustained conversation of canonical theories of comedy and laughter from Bergson to Zupančič. He considers the role of authenticity as it relates to method acting and, more precisely, to questions of subjectivity and the comic. The conclusion also moves Sammond's study of the earlier half of the twentieth century up to the new millennium's recalibrated relationship to minstrelsy and performances of an ironic relationship to blackface. One question animating Sammond's discussion is whether one can authentically perform an ironic relationship to stereotypical blackness: “Each of these so-called moments of ‘new blackface’ performs the knowingness of its creators regarding the wrongness of their performance” (284). Yet these performances do not construct a new stage for blackface for a supposedly postracial United States, but rather represent the “unfinished business” of America's “systemic, institutional racism,” the same curtain raised for another act (305).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. Alongside this already impressive list, though, the addition of more scholarship on blackness (such as the critical work of Sylvia Wynter or Frank B. Wilderson III) could have further fleshed out Sammond's latter arguments. Approaching animation and industry from multiple angles as he does, Sammond repeats himself at times; however, I read this repetition as part of the book's overall strategy of tracing and retracing facets of history in order to bring a larger picture to life. Finally, with such a broad swath of animation to choose from, Sammond left me wondering about cartoons that did not conform as readily to his model and whether there were any failed animation studio ventures at the time. Neither of these questions, though, detracts from this fully realized project. Overall, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation offers both a compelling argument as well as an impressive critical approach for studying how industrialization intersects mass cultural production.
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