Footnote #63 - The Censored Eleven
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Chris and Alex take a look at animation’s historical and troubling relationship to race with this examination of the Censored Eleven, a collection of controversial Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced during the 1930s and 1940s removed from syndication since 1968 for their inclusion of harmful and offensive racist stereotypes. Topics include histories of animating the other, identity, and experience within the medium and legacies of minstrelsy performance; the visibility of Black culture and jazz-based parodies like Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943) against more hidden (and no less damaging) iconographies within cartoon representation; and what it means to confront such legacies of racism within the critical study of animation, and if erasing any and all mention of the Censored Eleven pretends that racism in Hollywood did not exist.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Cohen, Karl F. 1997. Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons and Blacklisted Animators in America. North Carolina: McFarland & Company.
Lehman, Christopher P. 2007. The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Sammond, Nicholas. 2015. The Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Santucci, Walter, and Kelly J. Madison, 2015. The Cultural Politics of Race and Ethnicity in Animation. London: Bloomsbury Academic.