Staging Blackface in Canada with Cheryl Thompson

Recently, 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. We’re sharing a portion of that very interesting discussion.Cheryl Thompson lives in Toronto and is the author of Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812–1897, Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Windsor here in the Detroit River Borderlands.Dr. Thompson is an Associate Professor in Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University and currently director of Black Creative Lab where she heads up projects including a digital mapping of Black archival collections in Ontario and a database that catalogues blackface as performance and Black community's resistance to it. Her latest work, released this spring by Wilfrid Laurier University Press, is Staging Blackface in Canada: Public Amusements, Variety Shows, and Racial Acts in an Age of Imitation, 1898-1919.To watch the full conversation, go to the Amherstburg Freedom Museum's YouTube channel. For more information about the book, check it out on the WLU Press website.