Staging Blackface in Canada with Cheryl Thompson

Recently, the Amherstburg Freedom Museum hosted a virtual book launch for Cheryl Thompson’s latest work, Staging Blackface in Canada, which was published in April 2026 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We’re sharing a portion of that very interesting discussion.

Cheryl Thompson lives in Toronto and is the author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Windsor here in the Detroit River Borderlands.

Dr. Thompson is an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University and currently director of Black Creative Lab where she heads up projects including a digital mapping of Black archival collections in Ontario and a database that catalogues blackface as performance and Black community's resistance to it. Her latest work, released this spring by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, is Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919.

To watch the full conversation, go to the Amherstburg Freedom Museum's YouTube channel. For more information about the book, check it out on the WLU Press website.

Transcript

Recently, the Amherstburg Freedom Museum hosted a virtual book launch for Cheryl Thompson’s latest work, Staging Blackface in Canada, which was published in April 2026 by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. We’re sharing a portion of that very interesting discussion.

Cheryl Thompson lives in Toronto and is the author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Windsor here in the Detroit River Borderlands.

Dr. Thompson is an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University and currently director of Black Creative Lab where she heads up projects including a digital mapping of Black archival collections in Ontario and a database that catalogues blackface as performance and Black community's resistance to it. Her latest work, released this spring by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, is Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919.


This is a passage from chapter two, and it's beginning on page 90, and the subtitle for this passage is called Black Performance in a Time of Racial Terror. Black performers lived in a paradox at the turn of the 20th century, wherein their agency, representation, and freedom, real and imagined, sat in contradiction with one another. Wearing the coon mask was something many unquestionably knew was holding back their collective progress, but they also must have realized that, quote, they lived a conflicting double consciousness, where desire and demands were often at odds.


The concept of double consciousness, as coined by pan-Africanist intellectual W.E.B. Dubois, was and remains the sense of seeing oneself through a refracted lens projected onto the of public culture. As Black performances became fodder for theatrical reviewers, who were part of a new class of newspaper journalists, whereby the construction of idiosyncratic style or personality was crucial to establishing one's authority as an independent critic, the professional reviewer played a significant role in shaping theatergoers' expectations regarding Black vaudeville. As Karen Sotiropoulos writes, quote, more than simply performance reviewers, these critics fully participated in the performance world, both socially and professionally. 

By comparison, White reviewers were rarely able to see beyond the stage types to recognize the Black performer as actor. In her examination of Black vaudevillians, Daphne Brooks argues further that Black characters retained, quote, social, political, and economic freedom, end quote, but which could, quote, only be realized through mimetic rehearsals of American and European imperialism and colonialism, end quote. While Black vaudeville ushered in new forms of impersonation as stage convention, such as the African king and queen, Jaina Brown notes that, quote, some Black companies adopted conventions of ethnic impersonation that typified the U.S. vaudeville stage, end quote, which were created by Irish, Jewish, and Italian players. 

But for all Black companies, the buffoonery or cooning and the highfalutin comic attitude of the cakewalk functioned as shields that warded off the omniscient gaze of the vigilant White supremacist who scorned at the very idea of Black liberation, but who paradoxically relished in the humor and tomfoolery of vaudeville. If the Black man was the comic fool, he posed no physical harm, and his lack of supposed intellect also made him inherently unfit for citizenship. While Black Americans did not have an immigrant story, many shared a common migration story, having moved from the South to the North in search of a new life after the Reconstruction period ended abruptly in the late 1870s. 

However, these Black Southerners found themselves living in the North under a different kind of Jim Crow system that included geographic forms of racism. The idea of being able to construct a new identity through migration became a powerful symbol of progress that impacted Black perceptions of relocating to the North for a theatre. In Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods 1902, for example, a young Black woman named Kit wants to sing on the popular stage when she arrives in New York from the rural South. 

After auditioning, Kit returns home to tell her mother the good news, only to hear her mother express concern about theatre people and their morals. In response, Kit reassures her mother that, quote, nowadays everybody thinks stage people respectable up here, end quote. As Sotiropoulos explains further, quote, the Black professional class did not shun commercial amusements, but neither did they entirely embrace the new public culture. 

Rather, they monitored Black participation in public amusements, adapting some of the new cultural styles and censoring others, end quote. Alan Locke, one of the founders of the New Negro movement and later editor of The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on Black American art and literature, was one of the loudest voices on the question of whether social, political, and artistic change was key to the New Negro's championing and defending of civil rights. He was, however, also concerned with the commercialization of the Negro actor and the Negro drama, noting in 1922 that the stock playwrights and actors must be cultivated beyond, quote, the demand and standards of the marketplace, end quote, end quote, the exploitation and ruthlessness of the commercial theatre in the protected housing of the art theatre, end quote. 

When Black vaudeville emerged, it helped to construct alternate alternative worlds of Black pleasure and frolic. And as Josephine Lee notes, this new generation of Black performing artists, quote, would turn to Oriental characterizations and themes in order not only to showcase their artistic skills and escape minstrel caricature, but also to imagine different modes of Black expression and action. Even as these shows incorporated minstrel repertoire like Blackface and Coonsongs, they were antidotes to the threat of white violence and lynching, as well as the rhetoric that Black bodies were not suited for modern milieus. 

Importantly, before Black performers could step onto the North American stages outside of the minstrel show, Oriental plays and operas set in and around Africa helped to prime audiences for settings not of the southern plantation. I mean, I think I've always been, I've always been a music, I mean, you can see the vinyl behind me. I've always been a music person. 

Like my earliest memories of my, were my parents playing music. My mother actually doesn't realize this, but she was probably my biggest influence because she would, she would get up for work and turn the radio on. And then she would just leave it on. 

So, you know, as kids, we'd be sleeping and hearing music while we slept. And then when we woke up, like music was just a constant running theme. And then as you get older, you know, you start to, you know, I'm also the video, music video era. 

So then I started to attach that to people. And then you started to watch, you know, you watch enough image or you see enough images or you watch enough videos, you see enough films. I guess I just sort of have a mind of seeing patterns and seeing like, oh, that again, or, oh, that person is playing that role again. 

Or it's not even the, it's not the type that black characters were always playing certain types or they were acting in certain roles that seem to be designated in the script. This is a black role. Right. 

And I just over the years developed this ability to sort of spot it instantly and sort of see through, you know, the, the industry telling you that this is new when really it's just a repackaging of something that we've already seen before. And I also, you know, part of the writing process of starting to write these books, it really happened when I was teaching a course. And it was actually a week where we were talking about J-Lo. 

This is back when J-Lo was a thing that people, you know, talked about in classes. And it was this amazing article that I read. And it was the way the author, I can't remember their name now, the way they explained it to me, I was like, finally, I had my explanation of why I'm interested in this topic. 

The author was essentially saying the same thing of Latinx women, like the role, the Latina, like the hot Latina. That was the discussion that they were around. But what the author said was, white women play characters.

Meryl Streep is a character actor. Go, you can go through the list of them. Julia Roberts.


There's so many, whereas everyone else is a characterization. And once I understood that dichotomy, it's almost like the matrix opened up. And it's like, oh, my gosh, I can see it now. 

I can see everything now. I can explain it now, really through reading that author's theorization of a totally different group. But I could just see how it related to the things that I was interested in. 

And so that was really those two pivotal things kind of steered me in this direction. When I first started writing this topic, I was lost in the sauce. I really wasn't sure where to start. 

I could go back to Plato's cave if I really wanted to, really, right? It's like I was caught up in Renaissance era theater, Shakespearean theater, and all the different performative styles out of Europe. And then thinking about African performative styles of dance and rhythm, and the middle passage, honestly, it was like, oh, my goodness, where do I enter? So I thought, okay, well, this is a book, I'm trying to center Canada into this topic. And there's no better way to center Canada than to start with the War of 1812. 

Everyone will recognize 1812 as something that speaks to a Canadian narrative. And when I started to read more deeply, I realized, oh, actually, the minstrel show is connected to the War of 1812. Because there were songs that were played during that battle that were interconnected with minstrel shows. 

So all and what I learned in writing all of these books is every war comes with songs. Every battle, there's music to entertain the troops. Today, it's a much more complicated notion of war and entertainment.

You know, like Bob Hope, for those old enough to remember, is not going to go into war zones now and entertain the troops like that whole dynamic is a dynamic of the 20th century. Well, in the 18th century, there was no such forms of entertainment, but they had sheet music that people could learn. And then they could replicate those songs in the barracks.

And so that was kind of how I realized that I could start in 1812. And there was a there was a justification that I could explain. In terms of this book, what happened was I did not intend to write this book, just like the book that I'm writing now, which continues the story, believe it or not, there is more to say, I'm writing the book that continues this story now. 

And I did not intend to do that. I thought I could encapsulate everything I wanted to say in one book, like that was really my thinking, that I could start at the beginning, which is this 1812. And just take it right up to around the late 90s is really where I felt the story could end because everything after then is really derivative. 

And then I was like, how in the room will know where the 19th century starts is not where it ends. It is a very different dynamic from the beginning to the end. And, you know, and some of this is my editor saying, you know, you got to find reviewers who are going to have the expertise to review this. 

So most people are in a time period, there's very few people who can, you know, assess 200 years of history, they are usually as comfortable in maybe a century, or maybe a 50 year period, whatever it is. So some of it was just strategic. I can't write a book that's 300 years spanning 300 years in this topic. 

It's just not feasible. And so I realized that there's a special moment and I do explain this in the book, I can't recall if it's in the preface or in the introduction, where I explain that this is a unique 30 year period of time that is very different than the preceding 60 years, and very different than what happens in the 1920s onward. It's just a period of time that we don't talk about, that isn't really taught in schools. 

There is no even Hollywood rarely produces movies that are set in this time period. I always love I think about sinners, it's like they had to set sinners in the 30s, so that people would kind of understand everything. Really, that movie probably should have been set in around 1900. 

But we don't have any consciousness around the turn of the 20th century in terms of black storytelling. So I recognize that this was a gap. This was a gap in time, that for it to be consumable to a reader should just be isolated and shouldn't be linked with the first book that is really covering a particular moment, even though the first book does go to 1896, or 1897, I believe, the bulk of that book really is set in the mid-19th century.

And so it just made sense, you know. And also, my editor was like, give the reader a break. You know, it's a lot, it's a lot to absorb, and it's a lot of information. 

And one of the things I've learned through the process of writing, even the books that you've mentioned before, is that someone can really only absorb so much in one tone. You know, you can't, don't be trying to play the drums and the trumpet and sing and the xylophone. It's just too much for people to absorb. 

So that was also a strategic thing to say, I want the reader to really focus and not be distracted, because, you know, by chapter five, they forget what chapter one was, because so much time had passed. I hate to compare it to sports, but it's kind of the best analogy, where people are writing about this thing every day. And it was just, to me, the real shock is the common place of it. 

Because in our era, to mention this topic is for people to recoil. Whereas 100 years ago, it's everywhere. So that's what I'm, as an academic, that's what I'm interested in. 

How do we go from recoiling in the present to 100 years ago, it's in everything. It's on the, it's in the morning news, the evening news, it's on the billboard. It's what children are doing at school. 

It's what adults are doing on the weekend. I mean, it's just everywhere. And then all of a sudden, I guess, for generations, it's a dirty little secret that is hidden away completely. 

And most people don't even want to talk about it. I just find that, as that to me, is a phenomenon that requires explanation. And I think that's what really has shocked me of the topic. 

You know, it's how can something have been the thing, the most popular form of entertainment 150 years ago, to being a secret? I just, I don't know why. I mean, it's hard to say, it's like saying, why does an artist work with acrylic, and one decides to be a sculptor, you know, who knows, for whatever reason, that form is just appealing to you. And it draws you in. 

And I think, knowing that there was just when I started to dig so much of this topic, that no one has really ever tried to make sense of. It's like asking a surgeon, how do you deal with the blood? They are obviously built with some kind of countenance that allows them to open up the cavity of someone's body, and be completely unaffected by it. And in doing this work, I think I've realized that I have an ability to look at really grotesque, offensive things that would be very harmful, hurtful to people. 

And I have no reaction to it, because one, I didn't create it. And two, it's actually telling me more about the creators of that content than it is the victims of that content. Right. 

So I've always somehow, in the work, been able to create a distance, where I do this work. But it also helps that when I close my laptop, I don't think about what's on my laptop. Like I have very clear lines of demarcation in terms of my work. 

One, I don't work in any place other than my desk. You will never catch me at my kitchen table. Oh, let me look up another image. 

I don't do that. I don't bring this work into any other room other than the working room, is what I'm saying to you. I leave it there. 

That's one. And two, I take a lot of breaks. So when I get through a long passage of writing, like for the third book, I've kind of already written a semblance of a first chapter, I have to still work on it. 

I've taken a break. Like I finished that about a week ago. And I'm just like, I'm not on, I'm not even thinking about it. 

I'm thinking about other things and other things I have to do. And then I get back to it again. And when I get back to it again, it's hard to explain. 

I mean, I used to be an athlete in a former life. And if anyone in here is an athlete or knows athletes, there's a certain intensity to being an athlete. It's a very intense thing to do. 

Right? And when you're in the game, it's so intense. And then when the game is over, you're like, you guys want to go get something to eat? Like, you just shake it off. I see my role as not to judge history. 

I'm here to explain it to contemporary people, so that they have a deeper understanding of, to be honest, why we're here. Why are we still having so many racial issues in our contemporary world? I sort of see the work that I'm doing shedding light on the origin story. For me, it was just really important, I think, to write a lot of the work that I'm doing. 

It's really important to say, I know we think we're in modern times, computers, you know, AI is here, they say AI is the future. And I'm like, well, I would hope that the future is having clearer understandings of the past. Because from where I sit, there is a lot of delusion about how we even got to where we are today. 

Right? And I think, especially as it relates to the topics that I'm writing about in this book, really the entertainment industry, right? Like, theories of performance, or thinking about Black people as performers, or, you know, Dave Chappelle many years ago had a joke, you know, if you're in high school and you're, you know, you want to be something and you're Black in an inner city high school, well, you better start playing basketball, or running track, because how else are you going to get out of your situation? And everybody thought that was so funny. But really, that's a sociological examination of reality. For many Black people in North America, how are you going to get out of your situation unless you entertain? That was really what he was getting at. 

And I think that's why I write these books. Because when you understand histories of the entertainment world, you actually understand the complex layers for which Black people have to navigate, even if you're not in that world. Right? This idea of always, I mean, anyone who's on Instagram, and you follow any Black content creators, especially Black women, they talk a lot about this idea of always having to perform at work, or you're performing here, or putting on here, or having to act like this here. 

Those are not contemporary states of being. Those go back to the 19th century. You know, if you think about it, and then you think of the burden on a particular group of people of African descent, 400 plus years of having to kind of perform a self.

(20:51 - 21:54)
What are the, just think of the ramifications of that. It means you might not feel free at your place of work. You might not feel like you can fully show up as yourself. 

You might not feel as if people are always going to understand you. And I think I'm writing these books so that people can understand that reality. That those feelings are not feelings of 2026. 

Those are multi-generational realities of being Black in the Atlantic world. And so what that means is every generation has had to sort of maneuver in spaces where they don't feel that they can fully show up. But I chose this cover because, you know, those are three performers from left to right, George Walker, Ada Overton his wife, and Bert Williams, who are actually, that scene is from Indahome, which was a musical.

(21:55 - 26:45)
I chose this because don't they look happy? And it's the contradiction of what does it mean when a Black person is always, the imposition is that we always have to be happy. I've actually worked in places where someone said, you know, you don't smile enough. We need to see you smiling more around the office. 

So why write this book? Because where does that come from? Right? And how can we explain these contemporary pressures that many Black people still face to be happy or to not be too critical? Right? Especially Black women, we have that burden of you always have something negative to say. And is it that we're saying something negative? Or is that you'd rather us just sit here and smile to make you comfortable? Like there's a difference, right? And I think what I've, the journey of my own education in writing these books is just realizing how complicated racial histories are. They're complicated. 

You know, at the same time, you look at the cover, you're thinking, why would they perform in such demeaning ways? But does it change it at all if you knew that they wrote it for themselves? And that Black people were barred from the legitimate theater. They could only sing and dance and tell jokes. Those were the rules or else you did not perform. 

Right? So does that change now how you look at them and understand the constraints that they were living under in their time? If you read the book, you'll start to maybe see some parallels and think, oh, well, some things have changed a lot, but maybe some things haven't changed as much as we think they have. You know, some of these playwrights like Bob Cole is one that comes to mind. He did his best. 

He didn't want to continue to perform as part of these showcases where it was really just a minstrel show that was dressed up. He tried. So what he did was he would often conflict with the white managers of these shows. 

And at one time, he conflicted so much and he was arguing and debating that they had him blacklisted. And he couldn't perform and nobody would hire him. And so what did he do? You know, this is where Canada does come into the story. 

The Canadian stage was not a segregated stage in the same way. Theaters did not have rules about who could be on stage and who couldn't. So a lot of these black playwrights realized, you know what, we could actually debut our show in Montreal. 

We can't work on Broadway. Let's just go to Canada and debut there. And every time they debut in Montreal, sold out audiences, then all of a sudden it would have the New York debut. 

So that was kind of one way where, you know, they found Canada to be the Canadian stage, the theater in Canada to be a little more open to their ideas. So as I said, they couldn't do a drama. They had to sing, dance, and there had to be comedic elements. 

The stage was kind of limited to them in that sense. But they didn't say that they couldn't do topics of their choosing. So, you know, these black playwrights, they were some of the first to say, well, let's, let's go to Africa. 

As black Americans, let's set this entire story in Africa. Or better yet, there's another, Bandana Land, which is really about a black park where they wanted to build an amusement park in this black space. And it's about them negotiating with these like corporate white people about taking over their space. 

Again, this is in the early 1900s. You just wouldn't think that they would be having all of these stories that wasn't just a mimicry of themselves. I think this time period is complicated in terms of resistance, because there's so much hope. 

The New Negro was not just a term, you know, that 1900 when W.E.B. Du Bois has the Paris Exposition, and he debuts like the New Negro was a photographic series. I think there was so much hope that the new century was going to bring change. So much hope that I think, for about the first decade, like that 1900 decade, I think people were kind of just focusing on, it's a new century, it's a new Negro.

There's, there's, we have a black press, we're, you know, there's an optimism. And then it sort of hits them around 1910 or so, that, oh my goodness, things are not really changing. If anything, you know, the founding of the NAACP in 1909, it was really the concretization of we need, we gotta do something. 

We need an organization. We can't, individuals alone are not going to change the plight of the Negro. We actually need an organization that can work on the structural changes and be there to advocate for us. 

So I think post 1909, you really start to see a change in terms of the political culture. I wrote this book, and I'm inspired by these people, because they did all this when terror was outside the door. They still did it. 

And I think that's what it is. They, you know what, to sum it up, they still did it with everything, the Klan, lynching, Jim Crow, no voting rights, segregated seating, they still did it. I mean, to me as a black person, that's inspiration, because it means that we have something in us that no matter, nothing can kill. 

Even the worst of circumstances, it's like the creative energy is still there. I mean, I just can't say enough. It really makes you sit back and think on those days when it is tough, and there's a lot going on in the world, and there's a lot on the news. 

And you know, people are very, oh, it's so depressing. I'm thinking, no, no, no, no, no. There's really no time to be depressed. 

There's only time to act. There's only time to think about, how could I still be me and make a difference? Because those people lived at a time where there was really no reason for them to try to do what they were doing, because the outside world was really not encouraging of that. But they still did it anyway.