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Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Nicholas Sammond. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. 400. $94.95 (cloth), $26.95 (paper).
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond traces "the connections between the animated blackface minstrel, the industrialization of the art of animation, and fantasies of resistant labor" (xii). His core argument is that early animators developed unruly, cartoon minstrels in response to their increasingly depersonalized workplace. On a broader scale, the project works to situate animation within "a larger and longer history of racial iconography and taxonomy in the United States" (4). To make his case Sammond navigates a historically grounded racial matrix of minstrel shows, vaudeville acts, as well as other complex and contradictory representational forums.
Sammond inserts animation into the matrix through vaudeville's lightning sketch artists who dueled with their cartoon creations, much as interlocutors verbally jousted with end men Tambo and Bones. He frames cartoon minstrels in these terms: "[t]he figure of the minstrel epitomized 696 the rebellious commodity, and the performing animator (whether onstage or in the press) produced that commodity, then punished it for the very refusal that defined it" (71). As animation transitioned from an artisanal model with a sole animator to a management-driven industry with anonymous workers, an increasingly alienated labor force "created a commodity that appeared to speak back to its creators and assert its independence from the social and material order of its making . . . only inevitably to be put in its place" (110). Continuing minstrel tradition, these black-bodied, white-gloved cartoons functioned as unruly yet circumscribed fantasies at odds with their creators, as well as the conditions of their creation.
In chapter 1, "Labor," Sammond uses Max Fleischer's The Cartoon Factory ( 1924) to illustrate the alienation and containment of cartoon minstrels and their creators. In the piece, solo animator Fleischer builds Koko the Clown using an electrical animation machine that soon becomes part of the cartoon. This apparatus creates two-dimensional images and three-dimensional environments for Koko to interact with, but eventually Koko rages against the machine and builds a toy solider resembling Fleischer. With the animator now thrust into the action, he furiously draws on the walls and commands his creations to attack Koko. This self-reflexive cartoon wonderfully...