A Space Apart: Animation and the Spatial Politics of Conversion
Reading cartoons and associated exhibition practices in the silent and early sound eras, this essay examines the expression of the black/white racial binary in American animation of the 1920s and 1930s. It treats cartoons as a case study in the visual representation of the intersection of spatial practice, aesthetics, and labor/management relations in the reorganization of the American film industry during the transition to sound film..
Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern
Babylon Girls is a groundbreaking cultural history of the African American women who performed in variety shows—chorus lines, burlesque revues, cabaret acts, and the like—between 1890 and 1945. Through a consideration of the gestures, costuming, vocal techniques, and stagecraft developed by African American singers and dancers, Jayna Brown explains how these women shaped the movement and style of an emerging urban popular culture. In an era of U.S. and British imperialism, these women challenged and played with constructions of race, gender, and the body as they moved across stages and geographic space. They pioneered dance movements including the cakewalk, the shimmy, and the Charleston—black dances by which the “New Woman” defined herself. These early-twentieth-century performers brought these dances with them as they toured across the United States and around the world, becoming cosmopolitan subjects more widely traveled than many of their audiences.

Investigating both well-known performers such as Ada Overton Walker and Josephine Baker and lesser-known artists such as Belle Davis and Valaida Snow, Brown weaves the histories of specific singers and dancers together with incisive theoretical insights. She describes the strange phenomenon of blackface performances by women, both black and white, and she considers how black expressive artists navigated racial segregation. Fronting the “picaninny choruses” of African American child performers who toured Britain and the Continent in the early 1900s, and singing and dancing in The Creole Show (1890), Darktown Follies (1913), and Shuffle Along (1921), black women variety-show performers of the early twentieth century paved the way for later generations of African American performers. Brown shows not only how these artists influenced transnational ideas of the modern woman but also how their artistry was an essential element in the development of jazz.
Who’s in charge here?
IT IS INCREASINGLY APPARENT that health care reform will incorporate some global l imit on what society is wil l ing to spend. A global budget , however , says n o t h i n g about a host of microlevel decisions that must follow to achieve it. The ques t ion of who should make these decis ions is fundamental to health care reform. 1 This article argues that physicians should be in charge of microlevel decis ion making. Wc preface the a rgumen t with an assumpt ion and a disclaimer. First, we assume that limits need to be s e t t h a t the global budge t will not be adequate to del iver all services that pa t ien ts wan t or that providers cu r ren t ly argue are needed. Second, we choose to focus on what is at stake in potent ia l policies regarding who ' s in charge, no t on how such policies might be implemented . We recognize, of course, that there are many imped imen t s to effective l imit setting by physicians (e.g., confl icts of e c o n o m i c interests, real or perce ived ethical conflicts, and liability fears). Attention to how policy is best carr ied out, however , must await the decis ion of what it should be.