Casting Blackface in Canada: Unmasking the History of ‘White and Black’ Minstrel Shows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Blackface minstrelsy was the dominant form of mass entertainment for over a century, from the 1840s through the 1940s. In Canada, there has been little scholarly research into the topic but for the work of Stephen Johnson and, in recent years, the works I have published on the subject. One of the reasons blackface has been understudied is the dearth of attention paid to histories of slavery. By exploring the history of casting blackface productions, both ‘white’ minstrelsy (white performers blackening up to imitate the song and dance of African-Americans) and ‘Black’ minstrelsy (Black performers in and out of blackface performing caricatures of themselves in front of majority-white audiences), we gain an understanding of how these shows were produced, and what audiences found appealing about them. Canada has produced its own blackface stars, like Colin ‘Cool’ Burgess (1840–1905) and Calixa Lavallée (1842–1891), both of whom toured the United States and Canada in the late nineteenth century and who not only performed in blackface but also produced songs, some of which are still known today, like “O Canada,” the Canadian national anthem, composed by Lavallée in 1880. Additionally, what the history of casting blackface in Canada shows is a long-standing desire among white audiences for depictions of the American Plantation South that often included the participation of local actors like playwright and writer Charles Wesley Handscomb (1867–1906), who moved to Winnipeg in 1879, who were often cast in touring minstrel productions to sing in blackface.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
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".