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Nicholas Sammond. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke UP, 2015. 400 pp. $94.95.
In recent years the historiography of American animation has significantly expanded. Almost fifty years ago, pioneering scholarsJoe Adamson and Michael Barrier interviewed aging former animators of theatrical short cartoons of the 1930s and '40s. Then in the late 1970s, Barrier, scholar Leslie Cabarga, and film critic Leonard Maltin led the historiography's next phase-surveys of the studios that produced those films. By the end of the twentieth century, authors focused on specific trends in animation, from censorship in Karl Cohen's Forbidden Animation and ethnicity in Christopher P. Lehman's The Colored Cartoon to modern-art stylization in Amid Amidi's Cartoon Modern. Nicholas Sammond's new book, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, expands on the blackface trend that Lehman discussed by giving it a book-length treatment, as Amidi had done just for stylized cartoons. Moreover, Sammond looks at how staples of blackface minstrelsy-the white gloves, the widened eyes, and the spastic movements- aesthetically evolved and ultimately became intertwined with both the art and the business of animation.
Sammond starts by...