Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation

In 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...