Black Minstrelsy on Canadian Stages: Nostalgia for Plantation Slavery in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blackface minstrelsy, which began in the American northeast in the 1820s and 1830s, featured White, mostly male performers, who crossed racial boundaries by mimicking African Americans with the supposedly “authentic” music, humour, and dance ostensibly common on southern plantations. By the 1860s, newly emancipated African Americans also performed on stages in blackface. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Black actors performed out of blackface, but they were still required to perpetuate stereotypes plucked from the plantation. These troupes were led by both Black and White managers who promoted their performances as “authentic” and “nostalgic.” These elements of the black minstrel show — most prominently its supposedly “real” depictions of the American South and plantation slavery — resonated with Canadian audiences. It therefore provides another lens — outside of immigration policies and de facto Jim Crow — through which to explain the presence of anti-Black racism and xenophobia in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Canada. By examining the content of black minstrelsy, the role its managers play in its productions, and promotion in newspapers, this article raises questions about the extent to which Canadians have been historically complicit in the denigration of Black people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".