This is the first installment of a new blog feature, "Nonsense: Direct Quotes from Academia." Today, I quote from Anna Everett's book Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949. She writes:

"What frustrated Tolson most about Gone with the Wind was the film's ability to trade on the nation's racial imaginary and thus to circulate and indeed to be accepted as a mimetic equivalent to its historical referent." (291)

That is, Tolson didn't like that people believed that Gone with the Wind was actual history. Why did Everett feel the need to invoke theorist Theodor Adorno (mimesis), when it's obfuscating and unnecessary? Because, here as in the rest of the book, she doesn't really have anything to say.

This has been the first installment of a new blog feature, "Nonsense: Direct Quotes from Academia."