"A foul lump started making promises in my voice": Race, affect, and the animated subject

American Literature

Volumn 74, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 571-601

  Ngai, Sianne ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950185115     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-74-3-571     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. John Yau, "Genghis Chan: Private Eye," in Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work, 1974-1988 (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 189-95; further references to Radiant Silhouette will be cited parenthetically in the text as RS
2. Robert Stonum, "Surviving Figures," in Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: Univ. of Massachussetts Press, 1984), 199, 204
3. For a cultural history of the "ubiquitous Latino mouse" and some of his more contemporary cousins, see William Anthony Nericcio, "Autopsy of a Rat: Odd, Sundry Parables of Freddy Lopez, Speedy Gonzales, and other Chicano/Latino Marionettes Prancing around Our First World Emporium," camera obscura 37 (January 1996): 189-237. (Note how Nericcio's title cannily deadens the liveliness of this animated racial character.)
4. William Lloyd Garrison, preface to Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Mentor, 1987), 248 (my emphasis). Further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as "P."
5. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (1852; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1981), 78; further references will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as UTC
6. Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe," in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), 135
7. Barbara Johnson, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion," in A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 185
8. Rey Chow, "Postmodern Automatons," in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993), 61; further references will be cited parenthetically in the text as "PA."
9. Rosalind Krauss, "'The Rock': William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection," October 92 (spring 2000) : 11
10. Sergei Eisenstein, "II," Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986), 35
11. see Jane Feuer, "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches - An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1983), 12-21
12. Feuer, "Concept of Live Television," 14, my emphasis
13. "Critics Accuse 'The PJs' of Having Anti-Black Message," CNN Showbiz Today, narr. Jim Moret, CNN, 16 February 1999 (Transcript #99021600V17)
14. Philip Brian Harper, "Extra-Special Effects: Televisual Representation and the Claims of 'the Black Experience,'" in Living Color, ed. Torres, 64
15. Harper, "Around 1969," in Black Columbiad, 268
16. Harper, "Extra-Special Effects," in Living Color, ed. Torres, 71
17. On producers Norman Lear, Bud Yorkin, and issue-oriented, racial situation comedy in the 1970s, see Daryl Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989)
18. See also Jannette L. Dates, "Commercial Television," in Split Image: African Americans in the Mass Media, ed. Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow (Washington, D.C.: Howard Univ. Press, 1993), 290-95
19. and J. Fred MacDonald, Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television since 1948 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1992), 181-94
20. Armond White, "The PJs, conceived by Eddie Murphy," New York Press, 10-16 February 1999, 10; further references to this source will be cited parenthetically in the text as "TPJS."
21. See Zook, Color by Fox
22. Stanley Cavell, "Types: Cycles as Genres," in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), 33
23. and Coleman, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy
24. For an informative cultural history of Amos 'n' Andy, see Martin Ely, The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (New York: Free Press, 1991)
25. Conklin, e-mail to the author, 9 December 1999
26. On this strategy of excessive submission, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 5
27. Tom Carson, "Darndest Things," Village Voice, 2 February 1999, 137
28. I am grateful to Eric Lott for introducing me to Charles's work. It is also worth noting that the cover of Uncle Chen's Oriental Slapstick (Incidental Press, 2001), which reproduces a NOI-ZEE BOX brand fireworks label, features cartoon "Chinese" figures