I’m extrapolating from a comment made by Nic Sammond, in in interview with Henry Jenkins (part one, part two) I just finally came across. This never, ever occurred to me. I’m really looking forward to Nic Sammond’s new book, where he draws the links between the American “minstrelsy” genre (blackface) and animation. His first book, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960, is superb — it began as his dissertation at San Diego, where we both got our graduate degrees. And he seems to be building off of Eric Lott’s amazing book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, which changed my thinking about popular culture as a new graduate student.