1. From a political angle, the culture wars are dispiriting because actual policy debates get sidetracked, but from a cultural angle they are equally dispiriting because actual culture gets reduced to crassly partisan terms. Consider again Seuss & ethnic caricature.
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5. This very early Mickey Mouse cartoon from 1930 was written by Walt Disney himself and drawn by Mickey's co-creator Ub Iwerks. It really makes clear the visual debt Mickey Mouse has to minstrel imagery. Not how Mickey is nearly a mirror image of the ooga-booga native.pic.twitter.com/xX7cUnBzPF
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6. Seuss grew up on such images and used them wholesale in his early work. But even as he started to move away from them (as a result of his own political shift during World War II), he repurposed these images into imaginary beings, as
@philnel persuasively argues.Show this thread -
7. In the 19th and early 20th century in the United States (and indeed up till the present in the United Kingdom) it was common to portray the Irish as simians.pic.twitter.com/gSjcAlyfVn
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8. The Irish Simian lives on in two very popular characters: the American everyman Homer Simpson & the Grinch (which Michelle Abate traces back to images like this 19th drawing of Bridget McBruiser).pic.twitter.com/5ZTcKOf9RL
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9. I was dissatisfied with both sides of the Seuss wars. Unlike lunkheads like Ted Cruz, I wouldn't ever show the racist ooga-booga images to kids. But I don't want the books to go out of print either; cultural history is too important. The books should stay in print for adults.
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10. My sure-to-please-nobody solution is that Seuss should be in the public domain so the early books with racist/ethnic stereotypes can stay in print and be part of a discussion of the pervasiveness of racist iconography. More here:https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/seuss-racism-cancel-legacy/ …
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11. This is a good selection of drawings that really show the debt the funny animal tradition owes to blackface. Again: not an argument for "cancelling" (whatever the fuck that means) but rather for historical awareness.https://twitter.com/ben_towle/status/1379855208721874946 …
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End of conversation
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Excellent history of the Broadway Musical by Larry Stempel discusses how ethnic ‘genres’ (often performed by stars who weren’t of that ethnicity) were the core material of popular 19th c American theater. https://www.amazon.com/Showtime-History-Broadway-Musical-Theater/dp/0393067157 …
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The Black and White Minstrel show ran black face on the BBC until 1978, after 15 years of other bbc shows working to ridicule and cancel it.
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