Podcast Appearances
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. This is a portion of that very interesting discussion.
Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in the School of Creative Industries. She is author of Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She previously held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. She was born and raised in Toronto, where she currently resides. Her most recent book is Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty.
In the early twentieth century, as variety shows flooded Canadian stages, new forms of blackface, inspired by modern forms of amusements, changed the theatre. In this era marked by progressive social reforms, the stage embodied the modern ethos of imitation, mimicry, and change.
Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) traces the origins of theatre, dance, and concert singing in Canada and their connection to British & American song and dance traditions.
In this first episode, I introduce my scholarship and a major through line of my work—how systems of production intersect with gender, race, and power structures.
In the second episode, I dig into the timeline and conflict of my book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 (https://www.wlupress.wlu.ca/Books/C/C...)
In this third episode, I continue the discussion of my book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 by walking through the gaps I encountered in the literature on 19th-century minstrelsy and vaudeville.
In the final episode, I walk through the development of my platform, Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (https://mobaprojects.ca/) (MOBA), and I explain that while researching for my books, I found discrepancies in the archive.
Dr. Cheryl Thompson’s new book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom 1812-1897 comes out this month, and we discuss the creativity inherent in finding the story that ties together facts in an authentic and truthful way.