Gender, Race, and the Archives of 19th-Century Minstrelsy and Vaudeville
Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Recorded on 04/21/2025
Posted in The Authority File
Episode 422
This week Dr. Cheryl Thompson, Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University, continues the discussion of her book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897. First, she walks through the gaps she encountered in the literature on 19th-century minstrelsy and vaudeville. Finding that much of the canon neglected the 1860s-90s as women began to enter the stage, Cheryl also discovered that texts on this period often portrayed Black women actors and dancers in terms of resistance and exclusion. She explains how she wanted to move beyond these two views, instead focusing on how these women expressed their own agency and found success on the stage. In addition, Cheryl describes the types of archives she used when researching the book—newspapers, playbills, lithographic prints—and digs into the surprising and sometimes frustrating responses she received from librarians and archivists when looking through these materials.
About the guest:
Dr. Cheryl Thompson
Associate Professor in Performance
Toronto Metropolitan University
Dr. Cheryl Thompson is a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Black Expressive Culture and Creativity and an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University. Dr. Thompson is Director, Research and Creative Strategy of Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and Social Science Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded project. MOBA is reimagining Black archives in Ontario by making Black archival collections accessible and searchable via an open access online platform. She is also director of Black Creative Lab, an incubator for the curation of public exhibits, speaker events, and YouTube content.
She is the author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box (2019). Her next book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897, will be published in April 2025. In 2021, Dr. Thompson was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists for her contributions to Black Canadian studies.
Enjoy the conversation? Listen to the rest of the series:
- Talking Infrastructure, Education, and Canada and the Blackface Atlantic
- Timeline, Conflict, and Jubilee Singers in Canada and the Blackface Atlantic
- Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives and Canada as Part of the Atlantic World
Check out our previous series with Wilfrid Laurier University Press:
– Podcasting in Academia
– Exploring Ecologies in Practice and Environmental Humanities
– Outlining the “Big, Big Tent” of Comics Studies
– The Contemporary Leonard Cohen
– Creative Disruption in Scholarship
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