Racial camp in The Producers and Bamboozled

Film Quarterly

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 26-37

  Gubar, Susan ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Cultural industries; Farce; Genocide; Holocaust; Minstrelsy

Indexed keywords

EID: 64549121127     PISSN: 00151386     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/fq.2006.60.2.26     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp," A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1982), 119.
2. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 56.
3. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 144.
4. James Baldwin, "Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White," The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's Press), 430.
5. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 174.
6. Stefan Kühl, "The Cooperation of German Racial Hygienists and American Eugenicists before and after 1933," in The Holocaust and History, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 140.
7. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 49.
8. Sander L. Gilman, "The Jew's Body: Thoughts of Jewish Physical Difference," Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York and New Brunswick, NJ: Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 1996), 63.
9. Doris L. Bergen, "The Ecclesiastical Final Solution: The German Christian Movement and the Anti-Jewish Church," The Holocaust and History: The Known, The Unknown, The Disputed, and The Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 568.
10. Robert Kesting, "The Black Experience during the Holocaust," The Holocaust and History, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 363.
11. According to Enzo Traverso, in The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003), "notions such as 'racial warfare,' 'extermination,' and 'subhumanity' were widespread in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm as a result of colonial policies" in Africa (66).
12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 325.
13. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 165.
14. Keith L. Nelson, "The 'Black Horror on the Rhine': Race as a Factor in Post-World War Diplomacy," Journal of Modern History 42, no. 4 (December 1970): 626.
15. Quoted in Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, rev edn (New York: Homes and Meier, 1985), vol. 2, 393.
16. Seymour Drescher, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust: A Comparative Analysis," Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum, 2nd edn, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 100-101.
17. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (1909; New York: Vintage, 1936), 92.
18. Throughout I will refer to Mel Brooks as director and author of the screenplay (for which he won an Oscar), although Alfa-Betty Olsen was a collaborator on the script, according to William Holzman, Seesaw: A Dual Biography of Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 230.
19. Maurice Yacowar, In Method Madness: The Comic Art of Mel Brooks (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), 80-81.
20. One poem by Jerome Rothenberg refers to "the artistry of death a stage set / at treblinka ticket windows a large clock / the signs that read: change for bialystok": see Khurbn and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1989), 18.
21. Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 98-99.
22. Manthia Diawara, "The Blackface Stereotype," in David Levinthal, Blackface (Sante Fe, NM: Arena, 1999), 15.
23. For background, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
24. Tavia Nyong'o, "Racial Kitsch and Black Performance," Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 385.
25. In "Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (winter 2006), Bill Brown discusses Lee's concluding scenes as "not some literalization of the commodity fetish, but the reenactment of the breakdown of the person/thing binary" perpetrated by slavery (197).
26. See Ralph Ellison's "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callihan (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 100-12.
27. Edward Stankiewicz, My War: Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 132-33.
28. Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities (New York and New Brunswick, NJ: Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 1996).
29. Indeed, in a highly critical review of "The Producers," Andrew Sarris "simply cannot believe that any Jewish producers would involve themselves in such a project": The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy, ed. Stuart Byron and Elisabeth Weis (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 117.
30. Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Industry Reconsidered," The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O'Connor (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 233.
31. Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (1972; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 106.
32. In "Introduction," The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), Meyer illuminates the political uses of camp in sponsoring queer identities