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Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919
Paperback
Black American StudiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic StudiesTheater History
ISBN13: 9781771127011
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Published: Apr 14 2026
Pages: 352
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Long
before Canada had a national broadcaster or any mandate to promote its own
culture, its stages were already shaping how Canadians saw race -- and, just as
often, undermining it. Staging Blackface in Canada uncovers a
twenty-year period, roughly 1898 to 1919, when the same Canadian stages that
musicals and operas the country had ever seen, sometimes within the same
theatre, the same season.
This
was an era when Canada had no professional theatre industry of its own.
Instead, the stage borrowed its themes from amusement parks, social dance
halls, the new technology of recorded music -- and blackface travelled with it,
reshaping burlesque, comic opera, and variety shows into a popular
entertainment that drew white, Anglo-Protestant, English-speaking audiences in
the thousands, even as it drew criticism in its own time.
Drawing on theatrical reviews, images, and
archival records from a period with no media regulation and no official story
about Canadian identity, this book traces how popular entertainment became one
of the main venues where Canadians imitated, mocked, and occasionally reckoned
with race while Black performers created stages of their own in the middle of
it all.
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