Contemporary Authors

• Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005
• Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005
• Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2015

1. Birth of an industry : blackface minstrelsy and the rise of American animation LCCN 2015003368 Type of material Book Personal name Sammond, Nicholas, 1960- author. Main title Birth of an industry : blackface minstrelsy and the rise of American animation / Nicholas Sammond. Published/Produced Durham : Duke University Press, 2015. Description xv, 382 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780822358404 (hardcover : alk. paper) 9780822358527 (pbk. : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 004343 CALL NUMBER NC1766.U5 S36 2015 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Steel chair to the head : the pleasure and pain of professional wrestling LCCN 2004014274 Type of material Book Main title Steel chair to the head : the pleasure and pain of professional wrestling / edited by Nicholas Sammond. Published/Created Durham, [NC] : Duke University Press, 2005. Description 365 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0822334038 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822334380 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0419/2004014274.html CALL NUMBER GV1195 .S743 2005 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms Shelf Location FLM2015 239269 CALL NUMBER GV1195 .S743 2005 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Babes in tomorrowland : Walt Disney and the making of the American child, 1930-1960 LCCN 2005000325 Type of material Book Personal name Sammond, Nicholas, 1960- Main title Babes in tomorrowland : Walt Disney and the making of the American child, 1930-1960 / Nicholas Sammond. Published/Created Durham : Duke University Press, 2005. Description 472 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. ISBN 0822334518 (cloth : alk. paper) 0822334631 (pbk. : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip056/2005000325.html Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0f1v8-aa CALL NUMBER HQ792.U5 S26 2005 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HQ792.U5 S26 2005 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Author C.V. - http://www.cinema.utoronto.ca/includes/files/Sammond%202014%20CV.pdf

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  Nicholas SammondHome ContactOffice Contact409 Rhodes Ave Innis CollegeToronto, ON M4L 3A6University of TorontoCanada2 Sussex Avenue647.866.9649 Toronto, ON M5S 1J5Canada416.978.7271AcademicDegreesPh.D1999Communication, University of California, San DiegoM Phil.1996Communication, University of California, San DiegoB.A.1983Theater, Wesleyan UniversityTeaching And Research AppointmentsAssociate Professor, University of Toronto2009-PresentCinema Studies InstituteAssistant Professor, University of Toronto2005-2009Cinema Studies Institute and English DepartmentAssistant Professor, Hobart and William Smith Colleges 2003-2004Media and Society ProgramPostdoctoral Fellow, Washington University, St. Louis 2001-2003Mellon Program in Modeling Interdisciplinary InquiryLecturer/Instructor, University of California, Santa Cruz 2000-2001Department of Film and Digital MediaHonoursDean’s Award for Excellence, University of Toronto 2014, 2013, 2006NEH/Mellon Digital Humanities Fellowship 2011Jackman Humanities Institute Research Fellowship2009-2010Katherine Singer Kovacs Award,Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2006ForBabes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 (Duke University Press 2005).George Haydu Prize, University of California, San Diego 1999
  Sammond 2Professional AffiliationsSociety for Cinema and Media StudiesModern Language AssociationAmerican Studies AssociationCultural Studies Association (U.S.)Scholarly And Professional WorkResearch AwardsResidency, USC Digital Humanities Institute ($4,500)2011Jackman Humanities Fellowship ($55,000)2009SSHRC Standard Research Grant ($75,000)2007-2010Dean’s Research Opportunity Grant ($5,000)2007Katherine Singer Kovacs Award ($1,500)2006Connaught New Staff Matching Grant ($5,000)2006Connaught Startup Award ($10,000)2005-2008Hobart and William Smith CollegesFaculty Research Grant ($800) 2004Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ($78, 000)2001-2003Refereed PublicationsArticles“Touched by Le Roy: Teens, Tourette’s, and YouTube in the Twilight of Neoliberalism.”WSQ43:1 (June 2015).“The Writing on the Wall: Learning and Teaching Graffiti.” With Anna Creadick. Transformations24:2 (Winter 2014).“A Space Apart: Animation and the Spatial Politics of Conversion” Film History23:3 (2011).“Hidden, or Fear of a Black Planet.” Jump Cut52 (Summer 2010).“Picture Yourself: Lillian Gilbreth’s Industrial Cinema for the Home.” Camera Obscura21:3 (December2006).“Manufacturing the American Child: Child-rearing and the Rise of Walt Disney.” Continuum13:1 (April 1999).BooksBirth of An Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation(Duke University Press, 2015).
  Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the making of the American child, 1930-1960.(Duke University Press, 2005).Books EditedSteel Chair to the Head: Essays on Professional Wrestling. Nicholas Sammond, ed. (Duke University Press, 2005).Chapters in Books“Gentlemen, Please BeSeated: Racial Masquerade and Sadomasochism in 1930s Animation.” Stephen Johnson, ed. Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012).“Walt Disney’s Dumbo: Governing Individualism.” In Julia Mickenberg and Lynn Vallone, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature(Oxford University Press, 2011).“ ‘Who Dat Say Who Dat?’: Race and Humor in American Animation” in Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil, eds., Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (University of California Press, 2011).“Introduction.” In Nicholas Sammond, ed. Steel Chair to the Head: Essays on Professional Wrestling. (Duke University Press, 2005).“Squaring the Family Circle.” In Nicholas Sammond, ed. Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling. (Duke University Press, 2005).“ ‘What You Are ... I Wouldn’t Eat’: Ethnicity, Whiteness, and Performing ‘the Jew’ in Hollywood’s Golden Age” (Primary author; Chandra Mukerji, co-author). In DanielBernardi, ed.Classic Whiteness/Classic Hollywood(University of Minnesota Press, 2001).Encyclopedia Entries“Commodities, Commodity Fetishism, and Commodification.”The Concise Encyclopedia of Sociology, George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell 2011).“Commodities, Commodity Fetishism, and Commodification.”The Encyclopedia of Sociology, George Ritzer, ed. (Blackwell 2006).“Domestic Comedy and Family Drama.” The Encyclopedia of American Boyhood, Priscilla Clement, ed. (ABC-CLIO, 2001).Book Reviews“Reinventing Childhood After World War II,” Journal of American History99:3 (December 2012).“Film, History and Cultural Citizenship: Sites of Production,” University of Toronto Quarterly79:1 (Winter 2009/2010).“Getting Loose:Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s,” Journal of Consumer Culture 8:1 (Winter 2007), 155-158.“Sesame Street and the Reform of Children’s Television,” American Historical Review112.2 (Spring 2007), 549-551.
  Sammond 4“Santa Claus: A Biography,” University of Toronto Quarterly(Winter 2006/2007), 299-301.“Over the Edgeand Raising Consumers.” Television Quarterly35:5 (Fall 2005), 78-83.Non-Refereed PublicationsEssays, Websites, Etc.“Birth of An Industry—An Online Companion”: An online companion to Birth of An Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation(Duke University Press). (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/birthofanindustry/index)“The Early Animation Wiki”: A database that allows academic and private animation historians to share and critique data around issues of early American animation (www.rarebit.org).Animation Research Kiosk, Innis College Library, University of Toronto: An interactive database covering the history of animation in the United States, with over 2,000 short cartoons, many otherwise unavailable, as well as artwork, biographical information, and studio data.“Postcard: Expo 2010: Shanghai.” Photo essay with Aubrey Anable, Social TextBlog, 5 July 2011 (http://www.socialtextjournal.org/blog/2011/07/postcard-expo-2010-shanghai.php).“When Simon Met Susan.” In Medias Res(Posted 25 April 2009, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/04/23/when-simon-met-susan)“Playing With Stereotypes in Wrestling and Animation: An Interview With Nicholas Sammond.“ Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins(Posted May 10-11 2007, http://www.henryjenkins.org/)“Living at Death’s Door.” Cabinet, Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding, eds. (Spring 2004).Images“Mardi Gras Geishas (Batters).”Social Text26: 2/95 (Summer 2008) [Photograph]Scholarly Work In ProgressBook ProjectFluid Resistance: Cartoons, the Abject, and Social Critique, 1945-1990.The Abject Objection:Essays on the Abject, the Comic, and Everyday Violence, Nicholas Sammond and Margaret Hennefeld, eds.Articles“Swarm and Counter-Swarm: Insect Media and the Steubenville Rape Case.”
  Sammond 5Papers Presented At Meetings And Symposia“Gaming the Bonaventure: A Workshop” American Studies Association, Los Angeles, November 2014“Swarm and Counter-Swarm: Insect Media and the Steubenville Rape Case.” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Seattle, March 2014 “Send in the Trolls: Anonymous and the Crowdsourcing of Dissent in the Steubenville Rape Case” American Studies Association, Washington, DC, November 2013“Touched by LeRoy: Teens, Tourettes, and YouTube in the Twilight of Neoliberalism” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, March 2013“Comment: Animating Empire: Youth Culture and the National Imagination”American Studies Association, San Juan, November 2012“You are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working With Non-Traditional Scholars. (Organizer and Co-Chair); Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, March 2012“Like Workin’ Wit Mercury: The “New” Blackface and Performances of Post-Racialism”; Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, March 2012“Comment”; Post45 Conference, Cleveland, April 2011“Citizen Crow: The Contradictory America of STORMY WEATHER”; Society for Cinema and Media Studies, New Orleans, March 2011“The Visible Punchline: Affect and Violence in Cartoons”; American Studies Association, San Antonio, November 2010“Watch Me Move: Instructing Early Animation Audiences”; Domitor, Toronto, June 2010 “Kill The Wabbit: Laughter, Anger, and Affect in Animation”;Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Los Angeles, March 2010 “Gentlemen, Please Be Seated: Racial Masquerade and Sadomasochism in 1920s Animation”; Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, December 2009“Dumbo, Disney and Difference”; American StudiesAssociation, Washington, D.C., November 2009“Comments on Children and the Political Management of Affect” (Discussant); Feeling Photography, University of Toronto, October 2009“Seminar on Neoliberalism and Biopolitics”; Cultural Studies Association, Kansas City, April 2009“Comments on the Fetish of Violence”; Festival of Original Theatre University of Toronto Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama, January 2009“The Canon, So Honest!: Ryan Trecartin and YouTube”; Modern Language Association, San Francisco, December 2008.“Punk Rock and the Politics of Geolocality” American Studies Association, Santa Fe, October 2008
  Sammond 6“Jungle Jive: Race, Space and Desire in Depression-Era Cinema” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, 2008“From Tin Pan AlleyCats to Ducktators: Jazz, Animation, and the Racial Imaginary of World War II” American Studies Association, Philadelphia, 2007“Swing, You Sinners: Vaudeville, the Coming of Sound, and Self-Reflexivity in Early American Animation” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago, 2007“The Legal Concept of the Child” (Discussant) Online Child Exploitation Symposium, University of Toronto, 2007“Media: Shaping the Laughing Public” (Discussant) Jesters, Jokes and Laughter: The Politics of Humour in the 20thCentury, University of Toronto, 2006“The Global Child: “Consumption, Childhood, and International Identity” (Roundtable Organizer & Discussant) American Sociological Association, Montreal, 2006“Race and the Social Problem of Work” Cultural Studies Association, Arlington, VA, 2006“Mother Knows Best: Motherhood and the Regulation of Gender in the 1950s” Cultural Studies Association, Boston, 2004“Labor’s Body, Chained and Unchained: Whiteness and Negritude inI Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang”Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Atlanta, 2004“Discipline, Belonging, and Exile in the Cold War” (Response) American Studies Association, Hartford, 2003“Lillian Gilbreth’s Industrial Home Cinema” International Communication Association, San Diego, 2003“Careless Love: Early American Animation and the Mastery of the Minstrel” Society for Cinema Studies, Denver, 2002“The All-Consuming Child” (Response) American Sociological Association, Chicago, 2002Invited Lectures“Touched by Le Roy: Youth and the Governmentality of Media” Mellon Symposium: Disciplining the Humanities, Washington University, 2012“Biting the Invisible Hand: Animation, Labour, and the Racial Imaginary in Early American Animation” F. Ross Johnson Distinguished Speaker Series, Center for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto, 2007“The Thing Is, or, Animation, Alterity, and Indifference” Keynote Address,Graduate Conference in Cinema Studies, University of Chicago, 2007“Parental Guidance Suggested: a brief history of children in/at the movies” Keynote Address, Children and Movies Symposium, Washington University, St. Louis, 2006“Loveless Love: Early U.S. Animation Masters the Minstrel”Visual Culture Studies Program, University of Rochester, 2005“Beyond the Big One: Michael Moore.” Rochester Labor Film Series, 2004
  Sammond 7“ ‘Natural Conformity’: Popular Freudianism and the Production and Regulation of Cold-War Childhood” Washington University, 2001“Pop Goes Freud: The Emergence of Freud in Mainstream Popular Culture in the 1950s” University of Missouri, Saint Louis, 2001List Of Courses TaughtUniversity of TorontoGraduate Courses“Theories of the Viewing Subject” (2014, 2010, 2007)“Pressures on the Cinematic” (2013)“Developments in Film History (2012)“Cinema and Culture” (2012; Spring and Fall 2008)“Film and the Geography of Racial Imagination” (2011; 2009)“Theories of Cinema” (2010)Masters Major Research Papers Supervised“The Mutual History of Boxing and Cinema” (2012)“The Adult Fairy Tale” (2010)“Reflexivity and Labor in 1930s Comedy” (2009)“Expanded Cinema and Gallery Exhibition” (2009)“Animation, Authorship, and Ideology” (2008)Ph.D. ThesesDissertation Supervisor, “A Longitudinal Study of Movie-Going in ‘The Annex,’ Toronto, 1913-1986.”Cinema Studies InstituteDissertation Committee, “Performance Culture and the Silver Screen: An Account of the Origins and Development of Newfoundland and Labrador Cinema,” The Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, Stephen Johnson, SupervisorDissertation Committee Member, “Gay Pulp Fiction and Modernism.” English Department, Michael Cobb, Supervisor.Dissertation Committee Member, “My Life in Sequence: Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary French and English ‘AutobioBD’.” Centre for Comparative Literature, Julie LeBlanc, Supervisor.Undergraduate Courses“Origins of American Animation”(2014, 2012, 2006)“American Popular Film” (2013/2014, 2011/2012)
  Sammond 8“Children in Media” (2014, 2009, 2006)“Animation After 1950” (2013, 2009)“Comedy/Ideology/Discourse” (2013, 2008, 2006)“Social Problem Films” (2007)“The Revolution Will/Won’t Be Televised” (2010, 2008)“Film History” (2005-2007)Hobart and William Smith CollegesUndergraduate Courses“History of Television” (2003-2005)“Social Problem Films” (2003-2004)“Introduction to Media and Society” (2003-2005)Washington University, St. LouisGraduate Courses“Questions of Evidence: Problems of Theory and Methods in Interdisciplinary Inquiry” (2003)Undergraduate Courses“Making Children American: Childhood and American National Character, 1900-1950” (2003)“Homunculus: A History of Childhood” (2002)“The Popularization of Freud in the Postwar United States” (2002)University of California, Santa Cruz“Social Problem Films, 1930-1960” (2001)“History of Television” (2001)“Actors, Agents, and Avatars: Empowerment and Embodiment in Electronic Media” (2001)“Animation and Authorship” (2000)“Television, Culture, and Society” (2000-2001)Administrative Positions and ServiceGraduate Director, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto, 2012-2014Faculty Search Committee, University of Toronto, 2013-2014Cinema Studies Institute Graduate Committee, 2011-2014Tenure Committee, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto,2012Chair, Third-Year Review, Cinema Studies Institute, University of Toronto, 2012
  Sammond 9Tenure Review, EnglishDepartment, University of Toronto, 2012Host and Organizer, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Communication, University of Southern California,F. Ross Johnson Visiting Speaker, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto Fall 2012Research Dossier, Third-Year Review, Media Studies, University of Toronto, 2011Centre for the Study of the United States Program Committee, 2008-2013Host and Organizer, Fred Turner, Associate Professor of Communication, Stanford University,F. Ross Johnson Visiting Speaker, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto Spring 2012Host and Organizer, Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, and Corynne McSherry, Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Supporting the DIY Citizen,” DIY Citizenship Conference, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Fall 2010Host and Organizer, Anna McCarthy, Chair of Film Studies, New York University,F. Ross Johnson Visiting Speaker, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto Spring 2009Host and Organizer, Anna Everett, Chair of Film Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, F. Ross Johnson-Connaught Distinguished Visitors In American Studies, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto,Fall 2008Co-Organizer,Burnt Cork: Traditions and Legacies of Blackface Minstrelsy Symposium, University of Toronto, March 2008Host and Organizer, Margaret Garb, Department of History, Washington University St. Louis, F. Ross Johnson Visiting Speaker, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto, Spring 2008Host and Organizer, Leerom Medovoi, Chair of English, Portland State University,F. Ross Johnson Visiting Speaker, Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Toronto, Fall 2007Cinema Studies Institute Graduate Program Planning Committeee, 2007-2010Cinema Studies Institute Executive Committee, 2006-2008, 2010Centre for the Study of the United States Advisory Committee, 2007-2010Cinema Studies Curriculum Committee, 2006-2007Innis College Council, 2005-2007Institute for the Study of Law, Technology and Culture, 2006-2008Affiliate, Graduate Centre for Study of Drama, 2008-PresentExtramural PositionsChair, Executive Committee, Film Division, Modern Language Association, 2013-2016
  Sammond 10Panel Organizer/Chair, “Histories of Mediality,” Modern Language Association, 2015Panel Organizer, “Swarm, Hive, Flock: Considering Media Archeological Approaches to Events and Objects,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2014Editorial Board, Velvet Light Trap, 2011-PresentTenure External, University of Rochester, 2013Advisor, “Disneyland” Grant Proposal, Studio 360, National Public Radio, 2011-2013Delegate, Modern Language Assocation Delegate Assembly, Modern Language Association, 2012Kovacs Award Committee, Society forCinema and Media Studies, 2010-2011Pedagogy Committee, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2010Workshop Chair/Organizer, “You are Who, Exactly?”: A Workshop on Working With Non-Traditional Scholars. (Organizer and Co-Chair); Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2012Panel Chair/Organizer, “The Cry of Jazz: Voicing Black Citizenship Onscreen,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2011Panel Organizer/Discussant, “So Low You Can’t Get Under It: Roots, Rap, Rock and Is Resistance For Real?” Post•45@ theRock Hall, 2011Panel Chair/Organizer, “Punk Rock and the Politics of Geolocality” American Studies Association, Albuquerque, 2008Panel Chair/Organizer, “The Spatial Metaphor” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, 2008Roundtable Convener, “The Global Child: Consumption, Childhood and (Inter)National Identity,” American Sociological Association,Montreal, 2006Panel Chair/Organizer, “Race, Labour and Body: Histories of Representing and Regulating Subjects in/through Media,” Cultural Studies Association, April 2006Manuscript Reviewer, Duke University Press, University of Kentucky Press, University Press of MississippiReferee, Cinema Journal, Journal of Gender Studies, Television and New MediaReview Board, Theory and Society, 2001-2003Consultant, Redmond-Jones Associates (Museum Exhibit Design), 2005
  Sammond 11ReferencesSarah Banet-Weiser, DirectorAnnenberg School for Communication & JournalismUniversity of Southern California3502 Watt WayLos Angeles, CA 90089-0281sbanet@asc.usc.edu213.740.4088Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts, University of Southern CaliforniaAnnenberg School for Communication & JournalismUniversity of Southern California3502 Watt WayLos Angeles, CA 90089-0281hjenkins@usc.edu213.740.3951Donald Crafton, Joseph and Elizabeth Robbie ProfessorDepartment of Film, Television, and TheatreDeBartolo Performing Arts Center, Room 230Notre Dame UniversitySouth Bend, Indiana 46556dcrafton@nd.edu574.631.7054

Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling
Publishers Weekly. 251.49 (Dec. 6, 2004): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2004 PWxyz, LLC
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STEEL CHAIR TO THE HEAD: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling EDITED BY NICHOLAS SAMMOND. Duke Univ., $23.95 paper (344p) ISBN 0-8227-3438-0

Why do millions of pro wrestling fans spend their Saturday nights watching well-oiled, muscled and costumed men performing in a well-rehearsed stage play in which the winner is decided days earlier? What attracts devotees to this sport? Editor Sammond and a host of academics answer these and many other questions, explaining what they think really goes on inside and outside that ring (for Sammond, professional wrestling resembles burlesque more than sport). The writers, including a professor who wrestled under the name Professor Oral Payne, examine diverse topics: wrestling as masculine melodrama, female wrestling and its fans, the finances of the World Wrestling Federation and more. In a now famous essay, the late cultural critic Roland Barthes contends that the wrestlers are like good and evil gods battling to achieve a form of justice fans can understand. Of course, the writers take the sport much too seriously, exalting it as a cultural phenomenon whose mysteries can be uncovered by using the right academic jargon ("flesh--far from being the seed of meaning from which springs the signifying force of the wrestler, or the match, or wrestling itself--is but a node in a circuit of signification"). Regrettably, such language will limit this collection's audience. 31 b&w photos. (Feb.)

Nicholas Sammond, "Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation."
Film History. 28.4 (Oct. 2016): p185.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu
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Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

Birth of an Industry combines detailed archival work with close readings of early twentieth-century films to situate the rise of the American animation industry within the performative traditions of blackface minstrelsy. Moving beyond the simple observation that key figures in animation history such as Mickey Mouse or Bosko were minstrels, the book demonstrates how the minstrel figure was central to creating popular continuing characters, and how those characters refracted the labor practices of industrial animation. Noting the centrality of the blackface minstrel to American fantasies of race and the laboring body, Birth of an Industry details how the industrial processes of animation produced characters self-reflexively aware of their material base, resistant to performing as expected, and perversely punished by their creators for that resistance. The book is accompanied by an online companion that features every cartoon and film clip it discusses.

Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an industry: blackface minstrelsy and the rise of American animation
T. Lindvall
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1175.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
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Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an industry: blackface minstrelsy and the rise of American animation. Duke, 2015. 382p bibl index afp ISBN 9780822358404 cloth, $94.95; ISBN 9780822358527 pbk, $26.95; ISBN 9780822375784 ebook, contact publisher for price

53-3438

NC1766

2015-3368 CIP

Sammons impressive Birth of an Industry condenses and stretches various links among the evolving art, labor, and business of early animated film. Sammon (cinema studies, Univ. of Toronto) starts with a fascinating history of blackface minstrelsy and its insinuation into the American cartoon. In four thematic sections--"Performance," "Labor," "Space," "Race"--the author delineates the importance of this vaudevillian backdrop to the cartoon form. He connects slave cartoon characters (e.g., Felix the Cat) as performative minstrels and rebellious protesters of the animator's white glove, even as tropes for alienated labor power. Moving from the craft to the industry, Sammon examines how the fantastic racialized figure became a commodity of a repetitive, industrial, automated system, but one that sought to rebel. In the transition to the space of sound films, white fantasies about black life conflated geopolitical sites like the ghetto, the plantation, and the jungle into valorized loci even as racially vestigial bodies were marked with the vicious gags of racialized violence. Unfortunately, though the analyses of archival cartoons are brilliant, some dense academic jargon metamorphoses into an ideological sermon that muddles the book's otherwise cogent arguments. Summing Up: ** Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.--T. Lindvall, Virginia Wesleyan College

Reality SmackDown: Andrew Hultkrans on wrestling with the truth
Andrew Hultkrans
Artforum International. 43.8 (Apr. 2005): pS60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
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What is there in the neon spandex, leather masks, pounding heavy metal and rap of wrestling that recalls Euripides or Sophocles--the horrible grief of Agave, the literal and metaphorical blindness of Oedipus?" asks Nicholas Sammond in his editor's introduction to Steel Chair to the Head: The Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling (Duke University Press, $24). "What is there indeed?" a reader unschooled in the NutraSweet science of costumed grappling might reply. "Very little," Sammond admits like a good sport. But his whole line of inquiry might still deserve a rhetorical pile driver if it hadn't been initiated by an eminence no less grise than Roland Barthes, who pinned down the classical dramatic structure of pro wrestling in his famous 1957 essay, "The World of Wrestling." Barthes's piece is reprinted here, followed by "interventions" into the squared circle from a disparate group: media- and cultural-studies professors, a former pro wrestler, and a Mexican novelist.

Like a team of blind scientists pawing the elephantine Andre the Giant, the contributors, predictably, arrive at a host of conclusions. Wrestling is interpreted variously as working-class masculine melodrama; an ontological arena in which reality itself is contested and redefined; a laughably translated morality play (writes Carlos Monsivais: "Evil boasts. Good despairs. Evil sends Good outside of their roped-off reality. Good returns with a serenity exempt from compassion. Man, short of days and sick of troubles, is exasperated: 'Kill him! Finish him off! Fuck him up! Destroy him! Tear the bastard's eyes out!'"). It is a metaphor for modern Mexican politics and a barrio activist's trope; the "return of a suppressed class conflict," undermining "the consuming middle-class family as the symbolic center of the social order"; pop sadomasochism; a cultural "monster" thumbing its snout at society; an embodiment of the ethics-free economic boom of the '90s; a kid's show that became a striptease. And it is the unlikely focus of an obsessive female fandom--an online demimonde generating homoerotic "slash" fiction, ratings of wrestler's asses ("Cold, Old, and Stale" to "Hot Cross Buns"), and fashion tips ("Don't wear a yellow singlet when you're hung like an acorn").

Each of these readings has some validity, and Steel Chair's contributors perform a good-faith service in rescuing this unfairly, if understandably, maligned "sports-entertainment" from the "garbage" realm of "pornography propaganda," as the prudish Parents Television Council put it in 1999. But outside of Sharon Mazer's essay, "'Real' Wrestling/'Real' Life," and a few asides elsewhere, nothing in Steel Chair addresses the real elephant in the ring: the uncanny parallels pro wrestling has with the reality-bending Bush administration and its enablers in mainstream punditry. The perennial critique of pro wrestling is, "Why should I be interested? It's all fixed, fake, isn't it?" And indeed, the industry has for decades referred to its fans as "marks," that is, suckers. Hard-core fans pride themselves on being "smart marks," or "smarts," able to distinguish between the scripted 99 percent of wrestling moments, known as "works," and those rare, hotly debated instances when reality breaks through, called "shoots." Shoots can be instances of actual injury (faked injuries are common), unscripted bursts of emotion, or tradecraft-revealing or off-message comments in interviews. The rigorous maintenance of wrestling's fabricated reality, or "kayfabe," has all-too-real effects on workers and fans. As the former grappler Laurence de Garis notes, "'Working' can almost become a worldview. Some professional wrestlers become so used to deception and manipulation that they are skeptical bordering on paranoid." And Mazer, a close observer and fan, claims that "smarts" internalize wrestling's message that "everything--wrestling, life, the whole shooting match--might really be a work." Mazer quotes former wrestler Clifton Jolley on the ontological ether at the core of wrestling: "The fans believe--and the 'rasslers do too. But you don't want to know about that. All you want is the answer to one question: Is 'rassling real? Did he really hit you? And the answer is: I know, but you don't know. The answer is: What do you mean by real?"

Compare Jolley's studied prevarication to this disturbing "shoot" from Ron Suskind's October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine profile of George W. Bush and his handlers:

The [senior White House] aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were
"in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as
people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about
enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not
the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act
again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and
that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you,
all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
In one vertiginous, behind-the-curtain moment, Suskind has advanced from "mark" to "smart." But we should all be smarts by now. Certainly our era is not the first in which a government has attempted to create its own "reality" on top or in lieu of good old-fashioned real reality. But both wrestling and politics have come a long way from, as Barthes had it in 1957, "the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction." Indeed, the reality business has become increasingly complex. The semiotician did, however, have some eerily prophetic insights into our current geopolitical Super Slam, the "war on terror": "In America wrestling represents a sort of mythological fight between Good and Evil (of a quasi-political nature, the 'bad' wrestler always being supposed a Red)"; and "Wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture." Substitute terrorist for Red in the first and the war on terror for wrestling in the second, and Barthes's essay is no longer a historical curio.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Today it's nearly impossible to distinguish not only between works and shoots but also between marks and workers. The mainstream media's lapdog coverage of the Middle East in the months leading up to the Iraq war led those in the dwindling "reality-based community" to assume that our reporters and anchors had been "marking out" for some time. But in the past few months we've learned of at least six purported pundits who were actually performers on the White House payroll, as well as of the outre, WWF-worthy saga of James D. Guckert, "White House correspondent" for a GOP-supported "news" organ and real-life Hotmilitarystud.com gay escort. For close to a year, Guckert was regularly granted White House press credentials under the alias of Jeff Gannon, and strategically lobbed softball, agenda-enabling questions to Bush's press secretary or to the president himself. On January 26, "Gannon," after naming several Democratic pols seen as difficult by the administration, raised the unreality stakes to Lewis Carroll levels by asking Bush, "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" In wrestling parlance, this would translate as, "How are you going to work the smarts who ain't buying the kayfabe?" Politically speaking, though, the question is irrelevant, part of the kayfabe itself. There are enough marks in America today who believe the Good vs. Evil story line, believe Bush's "cowboy" gimmick, believe in the myth of a "hero" and a "warrior" who is neither; believe that Bush is, as Carlos Monsivais describes El Santo, Mexico's legendary masked wrestler, "the Torso of the Good at the juncture of the shadow of death ... the unreal and convincing hero of the hundreds of thousands who accept, in solidarity, the scenes and situations that he proposes."

Jules Dassin's 1950 film, Night and the City, depicts Richard Widmark as a London club tout attempting, for less than noble reasons, to promote classic Greco-Roman wrestling matches as a challenge to the pro-wrestling monopoly held by Kristo, an urbane, Euro version of the WWF's Vince McMahon. Kristo's father is the aging Greco-Roman champion Gregorius, who, disgusted by his son's sham version of the sport, naively agrees to help Widmark with his plans. After wrestling and beating Kristo's star, the Strangler, Gregorius is left near death. Before passing away, he tells Kristo, "My son, you do wrong. Greco-Roman is great art, great beauty. Must fight to keep." To which a present-day smart replies, "Reality also great art, great beauty."

Must fight to keep, indeed.

Andrew Hultkrans is the author of Forever Changes (Continuum 33 1/3, 2003). He is at work on a book about surveillance in America.

In this column, writers dilate on their reading enthusiasms of the season.

Hultkrans, Andrew

American Children Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960
Julia L. Mickenberg
Biography. 30.2 (Spring 2007): p306.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
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American Children Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. Nicholas Sammond. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. 472 pp. $24.95.

The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Daniel Thomas Cook. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. 211 pp. $21.95.

Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. Lisa Jacobson. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. 320 pp. $24.00.

"Why is the field of childhood studies relevant to American studies? ... Scholars of certain historical eras--perhaps most notably the post-World War II period--have paid special attention to children as 'barometer[s] of American life' (to use Richard Pell's formulation), but only relatively recently have works with children as their focus begun to gain the sustained attention of American studies scholars.... The three books reviewed here implicitly or explicitly suggest that we cannot understand consumer culture as a defining feature of twentieth-century America without examining its development in relation to children and childhood."

Julia L. Mickenberg. American Quarterly 58.4 (Dec. 2006): 1217-27.

Mickenberg, Julia L.

"Steel Chair to the Head: the Pleasure and Pain of Professional Wrestling." Publishers Weekly, 6 Dec. 2004, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA126198340&it=r&asid=b8c0eca3d512266d1c03e4ad217130a7. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. "Nicholas Sammond, 'Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation.'." Film History, vol. 28, no. 4, 2016, p. 185. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479623246&it=r&asid=0740b931425d3c264137bd774f302798. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Lindvall, T. "Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an industry: blackface minstrelsy and the rise of American animation." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1175. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661569&it=r&asid=1026ea2adb31c0f6b9073d1d0599b6ec. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Hultkrans, Andrew. "Reality SmackDown: Andrew Hultkrans on wrestling with the truth." Artforum International, vol. 43, no. 8, 2005, p. S60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA131433385&it=r&asid=8d7dee8eb5bf0ea27e2350972fbd5f7c. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017. Mickenberg, Julia L. "American Children Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960." Biography, vol. 30, no. 2, 2007, p. 306. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA164112027&it=r&asid=27370a0064e0c5a0ae16cbb3b554cafd. Accessed 4 Mar. 2017.

• H-Net
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/18732/reviews/18981/gennaro-sammond-babes-tomorrowland-walt-disney-and-making-american
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  Gennaro on Sammond, 'Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960'

  Author:
  Nicholas Sammond
  Reviewer:
  Stephen M. Gennaro

  Nicholas Sammond. Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 472 pp. $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-3463-7.

  Reviewed by Stephen M. Gennaro (Department of Art History and Communications, McGill University and Childhood Studies, Division of Humanities, York University)
  Published on H-Childhood (January, 2007)

  Reassessing Disney's Role in the Production of a Generic American Child

  In every class that I teach in childhood studies, media studies, or cultural studies, my students are treated to the film Mickey Mouse Monopoly: Disney, Childhood and Corporate Power (2002), which builds on the ideas of Henry Giroux's The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (1999) by asking: if our children are introduced to our culture (and learn how to be accepted socially and culturally) through stories, and Disney is the primary storyteller, are we critical enough of the stories that Disney is telling our children? It is amazing that after showing that film the class usually divides into three groups: (1) the group who is "changed" and can no longer look at Disney the same way; (2) the group who sees the points raised in the film but still love Disney and therefore cannot believe what the film is stating; and (3) the group who dismisses the film as a violent attack on an institution which was fundamental to their childhood and therefore could not be involved in any agenda beyond entertainment. Sammond places arguments surrounding Disney in the historical context of the first half of the twentieth century and in doing so suggests that Disney is not the producer of the ideology of the generic American child, but instead that Disney's connection to the ideology of the generic American child is part of the outcome of intersecting discourses about what a child is. By placing Disney the company, the institution, and the individual in discussion with the intersecting discourses about child-rearing--what is a child, what is the role of the child in society, and what effects do the media have on children--Nicholas Sammond's 2005 publication of Babes in Tomorrowland goes above and beyond Grioux, Mickey Mouse Monopoly, or any other piece written about Disney to date.

  Perhaps the most convincing point in Babes in Tomorrowland is made at the very beginning, which questions the assumption that "if bad media makes bad kids, then surely good media will create good ones" (p. 2). Sammond wants to unpack how arguments about the harmful effects of media on children also suggest, as the above quote stipulates, that "good" media can have a positive or beneficial effect on children. This assumption greatly benefited the Disney Company over the course of the twentieth century as it aimed to present itself as a company that produced media products like films, television shows, and theme park experiences about which Americans could feel good. Disney focused on presenting a unified image of its founder and its productions that drew on the ideals of the generic American child and was rooted in ideological assumptions about what a child was supposed to be. The second main theme that Sammond wants to unpack is simply the assumption that bad media make bad kids, which is based on assumptions about what a child is, the child's role in American society, and the notion of a generic American child. This idea of the generic American child emerged in the twentieth century through what Sammond terms a "discursive matrix," which in this book refers specifically to changing ideas about what a child should be (and not the actual lived experience of children) as they were expressed in (1) popular works of literature on child-rearing practices, like John B. Watson's in the 1920s and Dr. Spock's in the 1940s and 1950s; (2) popular works of sociology like Middletown (1929), The Lonely Crowd (1950), and The Organization Man (1956), all of which suggested that there was a universal middle-class persona that was central to American culture (and which was in jeopardy of being lost due in a mass consumer society); and (3) discussion of the effects of media on children and how companies such as Disney responded to these discussions.

  The argument in Babes in Tomorrowland aims to establish that beginning in the 1920s Disney entered into the existing public discourse about the negative effects of new media (such as cinema) on children, and existing discussions in child-rearing practices (such as the adolescent psychology of G. Stanley Hall, or the behaviorist approach of John B. Watson), which suggested that there was one generic or universal child. Disney entered into these discussions about the child and its role in American society through popular culture by aligning itself with an image, both in its products (first films, then television shows, theme parks, and commodities) and in its portrayal of its founder Walt Disney. Disney's aim was to appear as a media entity whose products and founder were beneficial to the generic American child. In aligning itself with the discourses about the generic child, Disney helped naturalize the persona of this generic child as one that was "white (largely male), Protestant, and middle-class" (p. 2). Where Sammond differs from almost all other current writers on Disney is that he suggests that Disney's role in this development of the generic American child was merely as an accomplice, who benefited significantly from fears about the negative effects of media on children, emerging discourses in adolescent psychology, mass consumerism and its focus on children, and changes in child-rearing practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Disney was not the creator of the generic American child ideal. Sammond is able to demonstrate this point by weaving together six in-depth chapters which explore each of the exterior discourses making their way through popular culture in the first 60 years of the twentieth century--their history, their changes, and their supporters and dissenters. In allowing the reader to step outside of the prevailing anti-Disney discourse which positions the company as a media monster and child-influencer, Sammond is able to more fairly explore questions about Disney's power. He shows how other factors, such as the emerging social scientific and psychological discourses about adolescence, in addition to the rise of mass consumerism and continual advancements in information and communication technologies, were at play in the creation and maintenance of a dominant ideology of the generic American child. Having established that Disney was involved in the creation and maintenance of a dominant ideology (but not the only party involved), Sammond is then able to question how it is that Disney continues to perpetuate a generic ideal that represents only a small number of children, and the natural ideology of childhood which is devoid of the authentic voices of children.

  If there is to be one critique of this book it concerns the form and presentation of the ideas. The topic, source work, and methodology/presentation are not innovative. Sammond deals with several main themes common to childhood studies, such as: (1) "childhood" as a milieu-dependent social construction versus "child" as the physical living being under the age 18 (as defined by the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child); (2) children's interaction with the media tends to center on the topic of how negative media has a negative effect on children; and (3) the media portrays children as either the future of our society, in need of protection and guidance, or the pariah of our society, from whom we need protection. Likewise, Sammond's scholarship tends to be in line with the current trend in childhood studies to cross over multiple disciplines and to center on the ways in which ideological discourses about childhood are reproduced and made real in popular culture. Furthermore, Sammond's choice of sources is not unique either. The connection between Middletown, The Lonely Crowd, and The Organizational Man (in addition to C. Wright Mills, whom Sammond dismisses as irrelevant to the project in his introduction) is not a new connection. Anyone interested in the status panic around the changing roles of the middle class in post-World War II America would find a variety of works that center on these texts. Likewise, the connection between Hall, Watson, Freud, Mead, and Dr. Spock is not new either, as anyone who is interested in adolescent psychology and the changes in how adolescents learn and should be taught will be introduced to each of the above authors and more by performing a simple Google search on "adolescence."

  Lastly, the methodology and presentation of the work is not unique, as the book itself reads like a doctoral dissertation. The book closely follows the template for how to write a dissertation in the area of communications, with an introduction that overviews the project, six chapters of approximately thirty pages each that are extremely in-depth and centered around the meshing of multiple interdisciplinary discourses, and a conclusion that is centered in the critical theory (in this case Marx and Foucault) that is talked around but almost completely absent from the rest of the book. As the template would have it, chapter 5 deals nicely with the notion of gender, chapter 6 provides a case study, through Disneyland and the idea of the frontier, and the conclusion summarizes what has happened since the 1960s and postulates where we go from here. Often the chapters are heavy and require multiple readings before all of the information can be processed. Although each of the chapters individually could be used in a course kit, especially the introduction or chapter 5 (on gender), the book as a whole is written in a fashion that would make it difficult to place on an undergraduate reading list, even for a course that dealt specifically with Disney, or the creation of childhood.

  What is interesting and unique about Sammond's work is not the subject matter, the methodology, or the sources he uses, but rather the combination of the three. Although many authors recently have taken to the task of critiquing Disney for the significantly large role it plays in cultural production, especially with regard to children and childhood, Sammond is the first person to do so by properly situating Disney in popular discourses about child-rearing, popular media, adolescent psychology, consumerism, middle-class fears, and new media in the first half of the twentieth century. In this regard, his project is extremely ambitious but also extremely successful and important to the field. The only other book that I have come across to argue anything other than "Disney as the evil corporation who shapes and warps the mind of children while owning a monopoly on what is the American child" is Douglas Brode's From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture (2004). However, unlike Brode, Sammond suggests a more balanced and less biased approach to the scholarship of Disney. In many ways, then, Sammond's piece is as important to current literature on the creation of a universal or generic child as Harry Hendrick's on "the construction and reconstruction of British childhood."[1] Sammond deserves congratulations for tackling several key questions in childhood studies and articulating what for many years has been a popular topic of discussion in literature, theory, and film: namely, how much power does Disney have, and of even more importance, where and how did this power originate and become naturalized into our current understanding of children, childhood, and media.

  Note

  [1]. Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood, and English Society, 1880-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=12799

  Citation: Stephen M. Gennaro. Review of Sammond, Nicholas, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960. H-Childhood, H-Net Reviews. January, 2007.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12799

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