Race and Region in Currier and Ives

I'd like to start with a quick shout-out to my classmate (and fellow renter) Marieke Van Der Steenhoven and her epic week of homeownership and its discontents. In response to Marieke’s query concerning the future of renting and owning I’ll give a brief quotation from everyone’s favorite New England summer tourist Teddie Adorno:

“Whoever flees into genuine but purchased historical housing, embalms themselves alive.”

You're welcome, Marieke.

Although my own presentation is part of the “Arts and Identity” panel on Friday afternoon and has nothing to do with homeownership, it does concern the persistence of American identity narratives that inscribe and normalize rules of national belonging. As my co-presenter Bonnie Miller suggested in her post, the images circulating through public consciousness can give immediate and convincing testimony in favor of governmental policy, whether in the 19th or in the 21st century.

“A Staple Winter Article of Not the Usual Kind”: Currier and Ives’ Darktown in the Northern Winter” examines the relationship between two parallax views of New England in late 19th century visual culture, embodied in the familiar “Old New England” scenes and the once-popular Darktown series. The thought processes that makes these prints legible cannot be separated from policy making of the same period, the 1880s and 1890s, which includes Plessy v. Ferguson and the codification of Jim Crow laws.  Here you're looking at "The Road, Winter," based on a drawing of Nat Currier and his wife near their home in Amesbury, Massachussetts, and the Darktown "A Team Fast on the Snow."

The Darktown series catalogs a staggering number of African American failures at a wide range of activities from firefighting to picnicking. Illustrator Thomas Worth’s vociferous version of the racist comic idiom long used in genre paintings, minstrel shows and cartoons will make most contemporary viewers extremely uncomfortable.

This had not always been the case at Currier and Ives, where in 1872 the printers had expected to make a profit from the serious, respectful group portrait The First Colored Senator and Representatives, in the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States. In a similar manner, the widely distributed lithograph of Mathew Brady's photograph of Hiram Revels, a Mississippi senator, offered Northern viewers a rhetorically powerful image of an African American politician. "Whatever may be the prejudices of those who may look upon it," wrote Frederick Douglass about this photograph, "they will be compelled to admit that the Mississippi Senator is man."

\

Rachel Miller, University of Southern Maine

Anne Berke: A Companion Piece to "Nips the Nips"

Herr Meets Hare (1945)

Some issues and questions to consider when watching this cartoon include:

• How have the writers and animators of this cartoon produced a work that speaks to both adults and children?
• How does the stereotyped comedy about Germans differ from that of Japanese in "Nips the Nips"? ("Herr Meets Hare," incidentally, was also unofficially banned from television, but not nearly as stringently as "Nips the Nips.")
• On the subject of banned materials, does the circulation of cartoons like these do more harm or good?

Anne Berke: Sketching out the War Effort: On Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips (1944)

            In 1944, Warner Brothers released Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, a cartoon featuring the title hero defeating not one, but a score of Japanese soldiers while stranded on an unnamed island in the Pacific. Nips the Nips became a target of controversy in the past twenty years for its anti-Japanese slurs and its violence against a series of Japanese caricatures.  This cartoon, recalled from stores for its racist content in 1995, can be found on various internet sites (including the homepage for men’s television channel, Spike.com), but has received no scholarly treatment beyond being deemed hateful war propaganda. Susan Elizabeth Dalton writes in her article “Bugs and Daffy Go to War,” that these “therapeutic cartoons began… with a resurgence of patriotism” (Dalton 159), but she dismisses Nips the Nips as an exhibit of “the awful extent to which cartoons would go in order to bolster American morale through a long and terrible war” (161). Though the cartoon served, in large part, to “bolster morale,” Dalton fails to explore in depth how this was achieved specifically through the cartoon medium.

            In this paper, I will analyze how Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips recreates two national mythologies – the resourceful, smart and individualist American (Bugs Bunny) and the treacherous, conformist Other (the “Nips”).  First, I will examine how the cartoon medium can communicate, visually and narratively, racist attitudes toward the Japanese and the problem of showing violence against the enemy within an animated universe. Second, the cartoon will be placed in the context of the “film bill” – what newsreels and features were these cartoons being shown alongside? – raising questions of authorship and audience. FFFFinally, Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips launches Bugs Bunny into the dual roles of Hollywood star, with the cartoon’s metanarrative discourses, and spokesman for American mythologies.

Eric Smoodin, in his book Animating Culture (1993), writes that the cartoon shares with the feature and not with the newsreel “a fictional narrative, depend[ing] upon a star system as a means of luring an audience, and ma[king] constant use of both comedy and performance” (Smoodin 45). The personality that is Bugs Bunny and the impalpable (yet indispensable) spirit of the nation at war are reinforcing, reciprocal narratives. As Bugs Bunny lends his irreverent, if sadistic, spirit to the war effort, so wartime national patriotism and its attendant xenophobia contribute to the cartoon hero’s emerging status as an American icon.

…

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->Watch "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips" (1944)

...

Anne Berke has an MA in Film Studies from Columbia University and is currently at work on a PhD in American Studies/Film Studies at Yale University.