2. By reducing the Seuss issue to the nonsensical category of cancel culture, an opportunity was lost to bring up something important, the pervasive impact of blackface & ethnic caricature on popular culture. Only a few informed scholars like @philnel discussed this.
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3. It's not widely understood that blackface & ethnic caricature weren't just popular in early 20th century, they were the very visual language through which America saw itself as a hybrid society.
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4. Blackface & ethnic caricature introduced a gestural expressiveness that changed American comedy. It's main legacy is cartooning. Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny etc are heirs. These 1930 comic strips highlight how much Mickey owed to Al Jolson & minstrelrypic.twitter.com/6gPgGWU1lf
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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
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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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Replying to @HeerJeet
They'll still be in the libraries, why should they remain in print against the wishes of the copyright holder, while the copyright remains valid? If you want to shorten copyright, that's a reasonable goal. But I don't understand this circumventing of it in particular cases.
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These books are nearly a century old. There is no reason for copyright holders, who are neither the creator nor the creator's family, to have a monopoly on them. Monopoly is a special privilege granted for a public good. What is the good here?
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Again, if you want to reform all of copyright that's a worthwhile argument to make. But this weird forced publication idea while the work remains in copyright is just strange.
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Replying to @warren__terra
The argument is that current bad copyright laws stand in the way of many good things, including archival & scholarly editions of these problematic books. Letting corporate brand managers whitewash the past is something centrist liberals love but it's socially bad.
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