Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives and Canada as Part of the Atlantic World

Sponsored by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Recorded on 04/28/2025
Posted in The Authority File

Episode 423

Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897 book cover

In the final episode of our four-part series with Dr. Cheryl Thompson, author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897, we turn to the archives. To start, Cheryl walks through the development of her project Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives (MOBA), a digital inventory of public archives on Black history and culture. Cheryl explains that while researching for her book she often encountered white-centered archives and discrepancies between an archive’s listed availability online versus when she arrived in person. This frustration inspired MOBA, which aims to simplify workflows for researchers and spotlight open resources. In collaboration with Cheryl’s Black Creative Lab, MOBA has earned several grants and aims to evolve into storing assets and acting as a model for other provinces to follow, with the goal of scholars using the archives to fuel creative thinking and artistic output.

To close, Cheryl explores Canada’s place within the “Atlantic world,” underscoring how blackface minstrelsy traveled from America to Europe to Canada and back again. Influenced by the social and political climates of each region, the minstrel show may have started in the US, but became a global form of entertainment within the triangular Atlantic context.

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:

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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