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..
Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film
From the earliest sound films to the present, American cinema has represented African Americans as decidedly musical. Disintegrating the Musical tracks and analyzes this history of musical representations of African Americans, from blacks and whites in blackface to black-cast musicals to jazz shorts, from sorrow songs to show tunes to bebop and beyond.

Arthur Knight focuses on American film’s classic sound era, when Hollywood studios made eight all-black-cast musicals—a focus on Afro-America unparalleled in any other genre. It was during this same period that the first black film stars—Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge—emerged, not coincidentally, from the ranks of musical performers. That these films made so much of the connection between African Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, Knight points out, because they did so in a form (song) and a genre (the musical) celebrating American social integration, community, and the marriage of opposites—even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences.

Disintegrating the Musical covers territory both familiar— Show Boat , Stormy Weather , Porgy and Bess —and obscure—musical films by pioneer black director Oscar Micheaux, Lena Horne’s first film The Duke Is Tops , specialty numbers tucked into better-known features, and lost classics like the short Jammin’ the Blues . It considers the social and cultural contexts from which these films arose and how African American critics and audiences responded to them. Finally, Disintegrating the Musical shows how this history connects with the present practices of contemporary musical films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Bamboozled .
A song in the dark : the birth of the musical film
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. VITAPHONE PRELUDE 2. THE SOUND BARRIER 3. "YOU WERE MEANT FOR ME" 4. ON WITH THE SHOW! 5. FINDING A VOICE 6. DUELING MAMMIES 7. HOLLYWOOD, REVUED 8. BROADWAY BABIES 9. "WITH ALL ITS ORIGINAL STAGE ENCHANTMENT" 10. JUST IMAGINE 11. THE CUCKOOS 12. OF VIENNESE NIGHTS AND GOLDEN DAWNS 13. IS IT A MUSICAL? 14. THE MARCH OF TIME 15. VOICES IN THE WILDERNESS 16. "WE'RE IN THE MONEY" 17. THE PAST AS PROLOGUE FINALE APPENDIX ONE: NOTES ON LOST FILMS APPENDIX TWO: A SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY: EARLY MUSICALS ON RECORD SOURCE NOTES SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX