Month: June 2023

Justin Richard Dubé est candidat à la maîtrise en histoire à l’Université du Québec à Rimouski. Ses travaux s’intéressent principalement à l’histoire politique et intellectuelle canadienne et québécoise des XIX^e-XX^e siècles. Entre autres, il a publié un compte rendu de l’ouvrage de Carl Brisson et Camil Girard, Reconnaissance et exclusion des peuples autochtones au Québec, dans la revue Histoire sociale/Social History (2019). Il signe également un article sur l’annexionnisme au Canada français dans le Bulletin d’histoire politique (2021). Vous pouvez lire son article,“L’octroi du droit de vote universel autochtone aux élections fédérales” dans JCHA/RSHC 31 no.2.

Qu’est-ce qui vous a amené à vous intéresser à l’histoire politique du Canada des XIXe et XXe siècles? 

C’est un intérêt qui remonte à ma toute première session au baccalauréat en histoire, et même avant. Je ne pourrais dire quelles motivations précises m’ont engagé dans cette voie disciplinaire : le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ignore ! Je me souviens d’avoir été intrigué très tôt par des personnages tels que lord Durham et John A. Macdonald. Ce sont deux hommes pour lesquels je n’ai pas personnellement la plus grande sympathie, mais c’est paradoxalement ce qui a dû stimuler ma curiosité. Depuis lors, le rapport des autorités fédérales envers les minorités nationales canadiennes n’a cessé de me fasciner. C’est sans doute un lieu commun, mais on comprend tellement mieux le cadre politique actuel, la dynamique des partis, ou encore l’évolution des idéologies lorsque l’on prend le temps d’analyser en profondeur les individus, les concepts et les évènements qui les ont forgés. 

Comment en êtes-vous venu à étudier les débats parlementaires de 1960?  

En fréquentant l’historiographie politique canadienne, j’ai été plutôt surpris par la quasi-absence d’informations sur l’accès des Autochtones au droit de vote. Par contraste, en histoire des femmes, on a accordé une place considérable aux luttes suffragettes. Au Québec, tout le monde sait que le droit de vote a été définitivement concédé aux femmes en 1940. Mais qu’en est-il des Autochtones ? Je n’en avais aucune idée, et j’ai vite constaté que je n’étais pas le seul. À l’approche du 60e anniversaire de l’octroi du droit de vote fédéral à l’ensemble des Autochtones (1960-2020), j’ai donc choisi de prendre le taureau par les cornes et d’aller moi-même jeter un coup d’œil. J’avais constaté que l’historiographie avait totalement négligé les débats de 1960, ce qui me semblait assez problématique. Les échanges parlementaires me semblaient donc la première source à aller consulter, afin d’analyser la séquence évènementielle et les motivations des députés. L’octroi du droit de vote reste d’abord et avant tout un acte législatif, et devait être étudié comme tel. 

Comment les députés ont-ils concilié le passage du refus du droit de vote aux autochtones sous le gouvernement précédent à un soutien sans réserve sous Diefenbaker? 

Je n’ai pas de réponse définitive à cette question ! Je peux cependant lancer quelques pistes de réflexion. D’abord, il apparaît clairement que l’initiative est venue du gouvernement de Diefenbaker, et non des députés en tant que tels. Autrement dit, le point de bascule a d’abord été l’élection des progressistes-conservateurs à la fin des années 1950. Je doute que les députés conservateurs aient tous appuyé sans réserve le droit de vote autochtone, s’il n’y avait pas eu cette impulsion de la part du chef du parti. Notons que les conservateurs avaient manifesté à plusieurs reprises leur sympathie envers le droit de suffrage dans les années 1950, tout comme les sociaux-démocrates (CCF). Le principal obstacle sur leur route demeurait le gouvernement du Parti libéral de Louis Saint-Laurent. Renvoyés dans l’opposition, les libéraux se sont retrouvés sur la défensive. Le changement d’attitude auquel vous faites référence a d’abord été celui du Parti libéral. Certains libéraux avaient été favorables au droit de vote autochtone depuis longtemps, mais la majorité d’entre eux avaient suivi la ligne de conduite du cabinet de Saint-Laurent. Ce sont eux qui furent amenés à justifier leur revirement idéologique. La conciliation fut très difficile. Par exemple, les contorsions discursives de l’ancien surintendant aux Affaires indiennes Jack Pickersgill pour justifier sa volte-face n’ont pas paru très convaincantes aux yeux des autres députés. Il faut rappeler que le nouveau chef du Parti libéral, Lester B. Pearson, était très préoccupé par la réputation internationale du Canada. Il se révéla ainsi fort vulnérable aux arguments de Diefenbaker, qui voulait explicitement protéger cette réputation en maximisant l’égalité des droits. À partir de là, la plupart des libéraux n’ont pas eu le choix d’ajuster leur discours et leur position en fonction des nouvelles sensibilités de leur parti, et du contexte idéologique en général. 

Quel a été l’héritage des débats parlementaires de 1960 au-delà de l’émancipation? 

Il s’agit d’abord d’un héritage idéologique. Personne n’a remis en question le droit de vote autochtone depuis cette époque. Quiconque viendrait le contester serait assurément et unanimement condamné sur la place publique. Dans les faits, l’universalité du droit de vote en général a été grandement renforcée par cette réforme. Il n’apparaît plus du tout acceptable aujourd’hui qu’un segment de la population soit privé du droit de suffrage pour des motifs culturels, économiques ou autre. L’arrimage entre la citoyenneté, le territoire et les libertés publiques s’en est trouvé renforcé, et surtout, devenu incontestable. Les débats de 1960 constituent alors un jalon important dans l’avènement de cette une nouvelle norme sociale, idéologique et politique. 

J’ai tendance à croire qu’ils nous ont aussi laissé en héritage deux autres éléments. Premièrement, en refusant de créer des circonscriptions protégées sur le modèle néo-zélandais, les politiciens fédéraux ont clairement statué que le caractère national distinct des communautés autochtones n’avait pas de conséquence sur leur mode de représentation à la Chambre des Communes. Rappelons que plus tard, l’échec de l’accord de Charlottetown empêcha que soient consacrés au minimum 25% des sièges au Québec en raison de son identité historique et culturelle. À la lumière des débats de 1960, on comprend que le rejet d’une conception plurinationale de la répartition des sièges et la prépondérance d’une vision uniformisatrice s’inscrit dans le temps long. Secondement, en se faisant les porte-paroles autoproclamés des communautés autochtones résidant dans leurs comtés respectifs, plusieurs députés ont pu contribuer à pérenniser l’instrumentalisation idéologique de l’autochtonie à des fins politiques ou morales, en plus d’essentialiser et d’homogénéiser leurs positions. 

En repensant à cet article, y a-t-il quelque chose que vous aimeriez y ajouter ? Fait-il désormais partie d’un projet ou d’une série plus vaste ? Avez-vous découvert de nouvelles informations qui modifieraient ou amélioreraient les recherches que vous avez précédemment effectuées?

J’aurais beaucoup aimé avoir le temps d’analyser en profondeur les réactions de la presse locale et internationale. Pareillement, j’aurais sans doute été comblé de pouvoir conduire la même enquête du côté américain, australien ou néo-zélandais, pour pouvoir tisser des liens entre les expériences de ces différents pays. L’analyse des débats des années 1950 serait également fascinante à effectuer, pour justement mieux voir l’évolution entre le refus obstiné de la Chambre et son revirement soudain en 1960 en faveur du droit de vote. Enfin, je crois que j’aurais pu davantage parler du rôle de Lester B. Pearson et de la transformation du Parti libéral qu’il a opérée à partir de 1958. Cependant, ces bonifications auraient nécessité des recherches supplémentaires, et auraient donc retardé la parution de l’article, que je tenais à publier dans un délai d’au plus deux ans après le 60e anniversaire de la réforme. Étant présentement occupé par d’autres objets d’étude, je ne prévois pas transformer cette recherche en un projet plus vaste pour les prochaines années. J’espère toutefois que d’autres historiens sauteront sur l’occasion pour pousser la réflexion plus loin, le champ est libre !  

Avez-vous lu quelque chose de bon récemment? 

Je suis en train de lire The Righteous Mind, de Jonathan Haidt, un remarquable essai de psychologie morale, très accessible pour les néophytes. Il aborde des éléments aussi captivants que le rôle des émotions dans le raisonnement moral et les origines évolutives de l’éthique. Tous les historiens, me semblent-ils, gagneraient à creuser ces questions fondamentales à la compréhension de l’être humain. Je traîne aussi sur ma table de chevet les Pensées de Blaise Pascal, un grand classique de la philosophie et de la théologie chrétienne. 

Dans un registre plus ludique, je me suis plongé récemment dans la série Dune de Frank Herbert. Que vous ayez vu ou non le film de Denis Villeneuve, allez visiter l’œuvre : les amateurs de science-fiction adoreront ! 

Aidan Forth is an Associate Professor of History at MacEwan University.  He is now completing a global and longue-durée history of the concentration camp for the University of Toronto Press (forthcoming in 2023) and conducting research for a new monograph titled The Passage East: Connection and Mobility in a Globalizing World. His first book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1902, won the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize from the Canadian Historical Association and the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies. You can read his response to the JCHA roundtable in JCHA 31 no 2.

How did you become interested in studying British imperial history? 

I was always interested in history. It is an ecumenical discipline that permits a broad investigation of the human experience. At the same time, history is fundamental to understanding the global present and its many discontents. This is especially true for the British imperial past. At its height, Britain governed over a quarter of the world’s population. The wars it fought, the borders it drew, the economic systems it established, and the political ideas it spread have profoundly impacted the world in which we live, both for better and for worse. The twentieth (and now the twenty-first) centuries have been marred by violence, racism, and the mass incarceration of suspect and unwanted populations. My work thus far has investigated the roots of these injustices and found many of them in the British imperial world of the late nineteenth century. 

Barbed-Wire Imperialism covers a huge swath of territory across the British Empire. What were the challenges involved in writing and researching such a global history? 

Global histories aim to provide a big-picture, bird’s-eye perspective. The payoff is that the historian can uncover connections between events normally considered in isolation and thereby understand dynamic interactions between different parts of the world. The challenge, of course, is that it is impossible to be truly comprehensive. The historian will inevitably neglect something important or else convey only a superficial understanding of certain local histories. My book Barbed-Wire Imperialism didn’t aim for (and certainly didn’t achieve!) full global coverage, but it did place different parts of the world—South Asia, southern Africa, and Britain itself—within a common interpretive framework. In doing so, I tried to break down historiographical silos that tend to divide rather than unify historical fields, which are still often defined by geography. 

Though the global (or “trans-imperial”) scope may seem daunting, I largely let the archives lead me. London, of course, was the hub of an imperial network, and its archives—at the Public Record Office and the British Library—bring together correspondence from multiple colonial realms.  My initial interest was the “concentration camps” of the South African (or Anglo-Boer) War (1899-1902), which also took me to archives in South Africa. Yet the more I read, the more evident it became that colonial practices from India—in particular, the concentration of distressed and marginalized populations in famine relief and plague quarantine camps in the 1890s—were important predecessors to the detention of civilian populations in South Africa. I thus spent several months in India, where I was able to access rich, granular records that were unavailable in Britain. In all these global travels, I was very fortunate to have the financial support of Stanford University (where I completed my PhD), as well as funding organizations like SSHRC, SSRC, and the Mellon Foundation. Research in global history can be expensive—a challenge that will only worsen as the humanities and public universities more generally face repeated budget cuts. 

“Composed for metropolitan audiences, The Graphic’s idealized image of a Madras famine camp depicts British officials in calm and authoritative postures, while humble famine sufferers are prostrate and receptive to British benevolence—grateful applicants rather than arrested suspects.”- Aidan Forth, Barbed-Wire Imperialism

Could you expand on the legacy of Britain’s “empire of camps”? How did camps exacerbate or facilitate racial hierarchy across the empire?  

The colonial realm, according to Franz Fanon, was “a world divided into compartments.” Camps demarcate space and divide populations. They are material manifestations of the larger colonial mantra to “divide and conquer.” Some of the first camps I examine in Barbed-Wire Imperialism are the plague segregation camps of colonial India and South Africa.  As we well know from COVID-19, viruses and bacteria do not discriminate according to class or skin colour.  But social policies do.  As bubonic plague—a much more serious albeit less contagious disease than Covid—spread across India, British authorities enacted draconian public health measures. Employing military counterinsurgency tactics, search parties invaded private homes and rounded up “suspects,” invariably the residents of impoverished native quarters, whom they detained in “plague segregation camps” surrounded by fences and wire. Yet while medical authorities recognized that Europeans were as prone to plague as natives, they officially and categorically exempted the white population from all plague measures. The legacies live on today. In Johannesburg, the plague camp was located at a former sewage dump in the suburb of Soweto, which formed the nucleus of the infamous native location that became an enduring symbol of apartheid.  In Cape Town, meanwhile, plague operations offered a pretext to burn the cosmopolitan neighbourhood District Six, once a thriving interracial community, but now an empty field, an eerie monument to the violence of colonial racism. 

The racial legacies of wartime concentration camps in South Africa are more complex. Here, Britain interned white Europeans—Boer farmers who descended from Dutch settlers—alongside native Africans as a military counterinsurgency measure. In doing so, they demonstrated the discursive flexibility of race. The Boers, British authorities maintained, had a “strong infusion of the negro” and were the “lowest stock of European humanity.” Camp conditions for black Africans, however, were far worse than for their white counterparts. And yet, the Boer population mobilized memories of the camps to build the ideological foundations for apartheid in the twentieth century: a strong, authoritarian, white-supremacist state, Boer ideologues argued, was necessary to prevent white South Africans from ever being humiliated again as a subject colonial race. In the process, the history of concentration camps for black Africans was “whitewashed,” via the destruction of archives and the erection of white-nationalist monuments. Recovering the black camp experience was one of the book’s most significant challenges. 

Where is your research headed now? Has the roundtable discussion given you new ideas of where you could take your research or are you going in a different direction?  

My current project Camps: Mass Confinement in the Modern World (forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press in 2023) is, indeed, a more global narrative of the camp, broadly conceived, from its early origins in prisons, workhouses, native reservations and slave plantations, through classic cases like Nazi Konzentrationslager, the Soviet gulag, and Chinese laogai, all the way up to migrant detention centres, Uyghur concentration camps, and the refugee enclosures that demarcate boundaries between the prosperous “west” and the Global South (a division inaugurated by the imperialists of the nineteenth century.)  

The JCHA forum has been absolutely foundational in helping me think about the Canadian dimensions of my work, particularly now that I’ve returned to Canadian academe after working in Europe and the United States. In Barbed-Wire Imperialism, I spent a great deal of time researching the devastating famines of the 1870s, which killed millions of Indian peasants and induced many more into British-run “relief camps,” which distributed food in return for heavy labour and exacting discipline.  Until I returned to Edmonton (my hometown), however, I remained largely ignorant of the hunger that swept First Nations communities on the Canadian prairies in the 1870s (and which was related to the same global El Nino complex that caused drought in India). This famine, along with devastating diseases (smallpox rather than plague) offered the context in which the Canadian government removed Indigenous populations from key settlement corridors and concentrated them in reservations. My new book will attempt to incorporate these local experiences within a broader global narrative of population displacement and mass confinement. 

Have you read anything good recently? 

That is a fraught question for an academic! As I note in the JCHA forum, James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains has helped me connect colonial practices in India and Africa with those at home in Canada, while Michelle Alexander’s provocative The New Jim Crow has helped me understand why the United States incarcerates more of its population, per capita than Stalin’s Soviet Union. As I complete the final chapters of Camps: Mass Confinement in the Modern World, I have also been turning to Victorian novels and travel memoirs in preparation for yet another book project on the connections between globalization and transportation in the nineteenth century. Around the World in Eighty Days, which I recently finished, is not only light and enjoyable, but it supports, in some uncanny ways, my underlying hypothesis: the easier travel became, with comfortable cabins on luxurious steam-powered ocean liners, the fewer opportunities travellers had to meaningfully connect with the people and places they passed by. This is a premonition the novelist Joseph Conrad (one of my favourites) expresses, as explored by Maya Jasanoff’s biography The Dawn Watch, which is also excellent. As a parent of young children, I don’t get a lot of time to read “for fun” these days, but for relaxation, I always enjoy a good David Sedaris story, while V.S. Naipaul offers a fix for whenever I feel nostalgic for India.

David M.K. Sheinin is professor of History and director of the History Graduate Program at Trent University. He is the winner of the Trent University Distinguished Research Award (2017) and has served as the university’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada mentor from 2015 to 2020. A member of the Argentine National Academy of History, David has held the J. Franklin Jameson Fellowship in American History (Library of Congress/American Historical Association), and has served as the Edward Larocque Tinker Visiting Professor in Latin American History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His most recent books are Race and Transnationalism in the Americas (co-edited with Benjamin Bryce, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and Armed Jews in the Americas (co-edited with Raanan Rein, Brill, 2021). You can read his article “The Slow Conquest of the Argentine Frontier: From the Subversive Gaucho through the Erasure of First Peoples to the Cold War Military Triumph over Antarctica” in JCHA 31 no.1.

How did you become interested in the history of Latin America? 

As a teenager (and atheist) in Toronto, I walked by the headquarters of the United Church of Canada every day on the way to the St. Clair subway station. The Church ran a bookstore on the main floor where I stumbled on the newsletter of the Inter-Church Committee on Latin America, which comprised as the group title indicates, of different churches in Canada. At the time, there were new dictatorships in Chile, and then Argentina. The newsletter covered developments in those countries far better than the mainstream media. I was hooked on the problems of governance, injustice, and political repression in South America. Years later and looking back, I realized that the Inter-Church Committee had played a leading (and still poorly documented) role in raising awareness among Canadians about refugees and human rights in the Americas. 

What inspired you to research the Argentine frontier? 

I like the amorphous quality of how people construct frontiers in Argentina and elsewhere. Unlike geological or national borders that come with assertions of scientific or surveyed certainty, frontiers are always imagined and never firm. As dangers and opportunities shift, frontiers move for those who conceive them. The late writer Larry McMurtry once wrote about the first members of his family travelling west to settle in nineteenth-century Texas. They were halted for a generation until the threat of Indigenous attack had subsided, and they could press on to their eventual home in Archer City where McMurtry was born. In this case, the frontier was defined both by opportunity and fear, sentiments likely absent among the Comanche people whom the newly arrived settlers feared but who had very different ways of imagining territory and boundaries. That element of the frontier—that we have to look for it in the past, by reading those who imagined and disputed it—is what set me going. 

I began to work on the frontier thinking about how Argentines understood military exploration in Antarctica after 1940—and how the armed forces trumpeted their accomplishments there. Argentines organized their understanding of the “conquest” of 1950s Antarctica by the parameters of nineteenth-century Argentine frontiers. That, in turn, was tied to conceptions of the most vital of Argentine frontiers, the Malvinas. People often have a hard time understanding why Argentines are so attached to a small archipelago in the South Atlantic, hundreds of kilometres from shore. The answer lies in how people build unique moralities and meanings into the frontier. 

Your article deals with a wide variety of material sources from writing, to movies, comics and posters. How did you find all these different sources? What was the inspiration to use so many different kinds of cultural evidence? 

In Canada and the United States, there are vital frontier closure narratives that have defined widely accepted national stories. In Canada, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railroad is one such narrative. The suppression of the North-West Resistance is another. Through the twentieth century (but perhaps not in the twenty-first), those stories resonated with most Canadians. As the frontier closed, the modern, successful nation emerged. In Argentina, closure narratives resonated with equal force and purpose. But in a fascinating contradiction, at the same time, among urban middle-class Argentines (and some others), the frontier never closed. It remained an imagined space that housed racially, culturally, and politically subversive communities that threatened the nation, but that inspired an ongoing potential for national triumph in the taming of the frontier. 

That contradiction has meant that Argentines have remained far more preoccupied with understanding their frontier, however, imagined, than Canadians or US Americans. As a result, cultural production about the frontier remains powerful and extensive. So, on the one hand, I was able to find sources in a broad range of libraries, archives, and private collections. In the case of the latter, I was willing to travel to Greater Buenos Aires where people offered to share family papers, obscure publications, long-lost films, and more. At the same time, the frontier is everywhere in Argentine popular culture. From UFO subcultures to pornographic films, the sources found me. 

Gauchos carne de fortin, painting by Enrique Mac Grech (1890-1969)

1. Your article speaks about the cultural absence of indigenous people in the evolution of the gaucho. How did this absence affect racial understandings of the frontier? 

A false racial and cultural binary of “white” cowboys and First Peoples was baked into US American frontier myths. As imagined over several generations, the cowboy triumphed over Indigenous peoples in a vindication of US nation-building. In contrast, the Argentine equivalent to the cowboy—the gaucho—has always been imagined more ambiguously, in the context of the contradiction of the frontier that closed but never closed. As a cultural icon, the gaucho might have been a noble, morally upstanding figure, representative of the best in Argentines. Or he might have been depicted as a quick-to-anger ne’er-do-well, eager for a knife fight. Through the gaucho, Argentines expressed their fascination with and fear of the frontier. For urban Argentines who identified as white, the gaucho was often a racially subversive person. He was “Black” as Argentines used the term, meaning that he was likely a mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestries. US American cowboys and Argentine gauchos did, in fact, have racially and ethnically mixed backgrounds. But in Argentina, the subversive meaning of a racially ambiguous gaucho raised doubts about a myth that persisted well into the twentieth century that the Argentine military had destroyed First Peoples. In the gaucho, Indigenous people were still there. So, while conquest narratives formed the basis to how urban middle-classes imagined Argentina as a white republic, free of Indigenous peoples, the longstanding cultural construction of the gaucho asserted racial and larger flaws in those nation-building narratives. Indigenous peoples survived in the most iconic of Argentine figures, the gaucho. Of course, while many Argentines disavowed their existence through the late twentieth century, First Peoples also survived as rich, independent and vibrant communities. 

Have you read anything good lately? 

Bruce Kidd’s memoir, A Runner’s Journey (Aevo UTP, 2021) is a masterpiece. The Saturday Night Live empresario Lorne Michaels said of Kidd that in the 1960s, every Canadian parent expected their children to live up to the image of Bruce Kidd. Early in the book, Kidd describes his childhood in the Beaches neighbourhood of Toronto. There is no better, more engaging, more elegant window into life in 1940s Toronto. With subtlety and grace, Kidd shows how his childhood adventures shaped a lifetime passion for building a city of neighbourhoods and compassion. 

Dr. Cherly Thompson is an Assistant Professor in Creative Industries at The Creative School. She is the author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). Dr. Thompson is currently working on her third book on Canada’s history of blackface. This book is based on research Dr. Thompson has conducted with the assistance of multiple Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grants. The first project, funded through an Insight Development Grant (2019-22), has examined Canada’s history of blackface performance, and at its completion will produce an open-source resource website and video series. The second project, funded through a Connection Grant, is in collaboration with Toronto-based film company Pink Moon Studio. Together, we are co-producing a feature documentary film on Canadian blackface. In 2021, Dr. Thompson launched a Media Representation and Archives lab for her project, “Mapping Ontario’s Black Archives Through Storytelling,” funded through an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2021-26). In addition to publishing in academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, Dr. Thompson has also appeared on numerous podcasts and media platforms in Canada and internationally. Dr. Thompson holds a PhD in Communication Studies from McGill University. She previously held a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Theatre, Drama & Performance Studies, and the University of Toronto Mississauga’s Department of English & Drama. She grew up in Scarborough and currently resides in Toronto. You can read her article Black “Minstrelsy on Canadian Stages: Nostalgia for Plantation Slavery in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” in JCHA 31 no. 1.

How did you become interested in the history of media and performance? 

I have been interested in the media for as long as I can remember. I collected and read magazines, newspapers, and in the digital age, blogs and websites related to entertainment, arts and culture. From a young age, I recognized that I wasn’t necessarily interested in becoming a dancer, visual artist, musician, or actor but that I had a gift for commentating on the performative arts. When I was in my 20s I became a music and film reviewer for a now-defunct Canadian magazine, Chart, and I also wrote for Exclaim! which is still in print. With these experiences I learned so much about communicating with an audience about a creative experience of seeing a film or watching a play, listening to an album versus attending a live performance. When I became an academic, I took this experiential knowledge and just applied it to history. As I read and learned more about blackface minstrelsy not singularly as a racist act – as it is framed in the contemporary – but as the most popular form of mass entertainment for nearly a century, I became interested in how media archives, in particular, provide us with a window to understand how performance cultures shift and change over time. In fact, I believe performance and media are so interconnected and interdependent (in that the artist needs the reviewer or the industry magazine to assess and comment on their work for their work to “exist” in the public realm) that you really can’t talk about one without the other. 

Your article looks at minstrel troupes who crossed the US-Canada border as well as the Atlantic Ocean. What challenges were posed by researching historical subjects whose lives spanned multiple continents? 

My approach to the study of minstrelsy is quite common in the literature as you cannot understand a global phenomenon, which it was, without crisscrossing borders and geographies of space, place, and race. The challenge comes with ensuring you understand the specific nuances of race in those geographies. That is, reading not only the literature correctly but also gaining an understanding of cultural differences, linguistic nuances, and also immigration. As minstrel troupes crossed the US-Canada border and the Atlantic Ocean, they were not singularly American and/or British but some were Canadian, others were immigrants to America and Canada from the British Isles. Thus, the other challenge is about ensuring a depth of understanding about national discourses and conversations about citizenship rights such as freedoms, expressions, and enfranchisement debates that were unique to each country/region during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in particular as the Western world shifted from an economy dependent on plantation slavery to market economies still tied to the enslavement of people of African descent but also diversified into other exploits like urbanization, industrialization, and modernization that shifted global economies from rural, agrarian systems tied to the physical (free) labour of Black and racialized people to economies tied to technological systems, like railroads, steamships, and eventually transport vehicles. My work aims to make sense of a genre of performance while situating that genre within larger sociocultural contexts that impacted not only the performers and the theatrical setting where shows took place but also audiences, promotion tactics, and media reporting. 

Bartlett, R.H. Cabinet card image of the Georgia Minstrels, including founder C. B. Hicks at center. Photographed for their Australian/Asian tour. From a collection dated 1919. Cropped version. TCS 1.440, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University

Could you expand on the idea of Canadian denials of racism? What is the legacy of this attitude toward Black people in Canada?  

Whenever I get asked this question, I think back to my childhood growing up in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. My sister and I were very friendly children and whenever a new family moved onto our street, we would immediately introduce ourselves to the children, because we knew they would likely attend our local school. In almost every instance, these children, who were white, would be receptive to our advances, and we would become friends with them. But eventually, they would stop talking to us, usually, after meeting other white children at school, they would also pretend to not know us at all. They would, over time, deny any connection with us and any history of being close to us. It was as if in an instant we were rendered invisible by them. Did they hate us? I don’t know. Were they or their parents racist? I don’t know. But what I do know is that when those white children met people who looked like them, they made a choice that it was what they preferred. Today, those same children we grew up with are in their 40s, some even have their own children, and they feel the need to “read” and attend workshops to “learn about racism” when, if they actually did some reflection, they would be able to recognize the moments in their lives when they have been racist and/or denied Black people’s existence. This is what I mean about Canadian denials of racism. Instead of personalizing their own anti-Blackness, too many white Canadians point to obtuse systems or structures which they agree are “racist,” but they remove themselves – their actions, beliefs, and attitudes – from the equation. The legacy of this removal is an inability for Black people to relate to, connect with, and have genuine conversations with white colleagues and peers because the elephant of 40 years ago remains in the room. 

You’ve done quite a bit of work on blackface minstrelsy in Canada. Where does this article fit into your previous work? Has it served as the launching point for future projects?  

This article was really important for me to write about because blackface minstrelsy was not singularly a genre of performance in which white men (and in the late-nineteenth century, white women) donned the “burnt cork” makeup of minstrelsy to caricature Black people; Black people also performed in blackface. I wrote this article to unpack and explain the phenomenon of Black minstrelsy – or the wearing of blackface by persons of African descent on stage. Why would Black people “black up” to perform as Black people? My article explains this complicated era in performance history where majority white male managers specifically recruited African American men on the heels of emancipation in the US in 1865 to perform on stages across North America and eventually Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, as “real Negro Slaves.” While there were some African American managers during this era in minstrelsy, the vast majority were white and often they exploited Black actors for significant financial gain. I wrote this article to explain this complicated history. It extends the previous article I’ve written about minstrelsy and “Dixie,” the demarcated place of the southern Confederacy and nostalgia for plantation slavery, as well as a previous article that begins to touch upon blackface minstrelsy as a form of popular culture in Canada. I’m currently writing my book on Canada’s history of blackface, tentatively titled, Blackface Up North and this article as well as my previous works, will all play a part in unpacking this centuries-long, transnational history about not only popular entertainment culture but also racism, power, politics, and representation. 

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “Lithographic portrait of Billy Kersands promoting Callender’s Minstrels” New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/cb9bfc10-04e1-0139-5b11-0242ac110003

Since this article’s publication have you come across anything that you wished you had known about before writing this piece? Is there anything you wished you could have added to it? 

Whenever I write articles, I do so because I have something compact to say. Meaning, I leave nothing unsaid in the article because it is so squarely focused on one aspect of my larger scholarly practice. This article is complete for me. I have nothing further to add to it, but what I will do is use this article in my book to expand on what wasn’t expandable within the context of a journal article. Such as unpacking in more depth pre-Emancipation America versus post-Emancipation America in terms of laws, conflicts, systems of power and capital. These topics had to be drastically condensed in the writing of the article. Additionally, in my book, I will provide much more detailed biographical information on minstrelsy’s Black performers – who they were, what led them to the stage, what they did after minstrelsy’s decline, and why their legacy matters. It is important to note that I have been studying the history of blackface for over a decade, reading every text there is to read, learning the canon – key questions, debates, timelines, and critiques – and exploring Canada’s archives for primary data that range from newspaper clippings to visual ephemera, theatrical playbills to photographs from private collections. This corpus means that in writing this article, I was very selective and purposeful in my focus so it’s not really about “wishing I could have added to it” but more so about what’s yet to be said in the larger time that’s to come. 

Have you read anything good lately?

I’m currently writing my third book, so it is difficult to find time to read purely for pleasure, but of the books I’ve read for this project, Monica Millers’ Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity is high on the list. Her detailed accounting of how clothing, something that we associated today mostly with fashion and identity, has played such an important role in Black self-fashioning and adornment from the moment African people landed on the shores of North America and the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book also intersects with my focus on blackface, unpacking the Black Dandy of minstrelsy, “Zip Coon” as the character was called, and the ways in which the theatrical stage, through caricature, used clothing to frame Black bodies as Other. But conversely, African Americans reimagined, reimaged, and reframed the garments at their disposal to create an expressive culture that would, in the twentieth century and beyond, become one of the most influential fashion trendsetters not only in North America but globally. So the book is a story of not only survival and resistance, but ingenuity, creativity, and transformation. It inspires me every time I read it. 

Olivier Guimond est candidat au doctorat en histoire à l’Université d’Ottawa. Ses recherches portent sur l’histoire intellectuelle et culturelle de la question seigneuriale au Québec pendant le XIX^e siècle. Sa thèse de maîtrise en histoire portait sur Louis-Joseph Papineau et la dualité de sa situation en tant que républicain et seigneur. Vous pouvez lire son article,“Louis-Joseph Papineau’s Seigneurialism, Republicanism, and Jeffersonian Inclinations” dans JCHA/RSHC 31 no.1.

Comment en êtes-vous arrivé à vous intéresser au Québec du XIXe siècle ? 

Je crois m’intéresser à l’histoire depuis mes premiers cours d’histoire au secondaire. Nous avions un professeur passionné par sa matière et qui ne manquait pas de nous faire savoir combien la Conquête en avait coûté aux Canadiens français ! Pour l’histoire du Québec en particulier, au point d’en faire un intérêt de recherche aux cycles supérieurs, cela remonte, je crois, à 2012, c’est-à-dire au contexte de la crise étudiante. C’était un événement qui me semblait significatif sur le plan culturel, sur le plan social. Des débats profonds animaient la société québécoise, et c’est la première fois que, vraiment, je m’y intéressais et y prenais une part active. C’est à ce moment qu’est venu mon envie de mieux comprendre ma société et son histoire. Dix ans plus tard, j’ai bien l’impression que ce sera une quête toujours inachevée…  

Comment en êtes-vous venu à étudier Louis-Joseph Papineau ? 

C’est le professeur Benoît Grenier qui m’a indiqué, d’après une idée que lui avait communiqué Yvan Lamonde,  l’intérêt d’étudier le rapport de Papineau avec le régime seigneurial. J’ai immédiatement été intrigué et en ait fait un sujet de maîtrise. D’abord, Papineau (1786-1871), qui vécut une longue et intéressante vie, me semblait constituer un beau prétexte pour étudier une large période de l’histoire nationale. Par le truchement du régime seigneurial, j’entrevoyais la possibilité de me familiariser encore davantage avec l’histoire de la Nouvelle-France, en plus de celle du Bas-Canada. Enfin, et non le moindre des intérêts, ce sujet me semblait en être un d’histoire intellectuelle. Or, j’ai toujours été intéressé, d’aussi loin que je me souvienne, par les idées. Bien plus que de simples artifices rhétoriques ou que des spéculations métaphysiques, les idées ont toujours eu, aussi, à mon avis, un impact concret sur la société. Une des choses que j’aimais le plus, durant mes études à l’Université de Sherbrooke, étaient les soirées passées avec mes meilleurs amis à discuter et débattre de philosophie, de littérature, d’histoire, de politique, bref, de jouer avec les idées. Pour moi, c’était aussi amusant qu’important de faire cela. Alors, je l’avoue, je voyais dans l’étude de Papineau, en plus de l’occasion d’en tirer une meilleure compréhension de l’histoire, une formidable opportunité de m’aiguiser l’esprit en vue de ces moments que je chérissais! 

Boisseau, Alfred. Portrait of Louis-Joseph Papineau 1871, oil on canvas, Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1978-39-6

Quel a été l’impact des idéaux de Jefferson sur les mouvements républicains au Canada ? 

Je pense que l’impact des idéaux jeffersoniens sur les mouvements républicains au Canada n’ont pas été très grands. Les sources manquent pour attester d’une influence profonde et sans équivoque, à ma connaissance. Bien sûr, la Révolution américaine avait encore une grande résonnance au début du 19e siècle, dans les Canadas. Et les principes établis dans la Déclaration d’indépendance des États-Unis, dont le premier jet a été rédigé par Thomas Jefferson, étaient bien connus; on s’en réclamait chez les républicains du Haut- et du Bas-Canada, dans les années 1830. Ces idéaux « jeffersoniens » ont été utiles pour aborder, par exemple, les notions de droits et de liberté en vue de critiquer l’ordre établi. Mais réduire les principes jeffersoniens à cette Déclaration, ou même réduire ce document à une œuvre seule de Jefferson serait une erreur, je pense. En fait, le cas de Papineau, bien documenté par la grande quantité d’archives qu’il nous a laissé, est exceptionnel à ce chapitre. Il ne faudrait pas généraliser son cas. Il était ouvertement un fervent admirateur de Jefferson, connaissait bien sa vie et avait abondamment fréquenté ses écrits. Je pense aussi qu’il s’identifiait personnellement, à certains niveaux, à Jefferson. Bref, il y a bien, selon moi, une part jeffersonienne à la pensée politique de Papineau, y compris sur le régime seigneurial. Pour Papineau, inspiré des idées de Jefferson, le régime seigneurial avait toujours sa place à l’ère de la démocratie, car ce régime offrait un moyen facile d’accéder à la propriété. Or, pour lui, le citoyen-propriétaire constituait l’élément de base d’une république démocratique. Dans le cas bien particulier du Bas-Canada, pour Papineau, ce citoyen-propriétaire pouvait très bien être un censitaire! Il suffisait, dans son esprit, de comprendre les vérités de l’histoire des Canadiens de même que les nécessité du présent et de l’avenir pour s’en convaincre. 

Que pouvons-nous apprendre sur la politique au XIXe siècle au Canada en lisant les écrits de Papineau ? 

Fréquenter les écrits de Papineau, c’est fréquenter les grands événements politiques qui ont jalonné six décennies du 19e siècle. Ce sont des sources très riches, alors je m’en tiendrai au républicanisme pour répondre à la question. D’une part, je pense que les écrits de Papineau offrent une fenêtre sur l’intensité et l’organisation du mouvement républicain au Bas-Canada, dans les années 1830, et sur ses origines dans la décennie précédente. C’est déjà beaucoup. Mais, d’autre part, les archives nous montrent que ce mouvement n’était pas monolithique. C’est que Papineau était beaucoup moins doctrinaire, je crois, que d’autres républicains proches de lui. Déjà, Lionel Groulx a tenté de démontrer cela concernant son rapport nuancé avec la religion et avec l’Église catholique. La question seigneuriale permet de le démontrer de manière plus saisissante encore, peut-être. Par exemple, quand des patriotes et, par la suite, des Rouges, ont milité pour l’abolition du régime seigneurial – relique d’une époque barbare dans leur esprit –, au nom du progrès, de la liberté, de tout ce que commande l’époque « moderne », Papineau leur répondait qu’ils étaient trop idéologiques, qu’ils n’avaient pas compris la nature du régime seigneurial canadien qui n’avait rien de la sévérité du féodalisme. En fait, pour Papineau, le républicanisme était un modèle qui pouvait, certes, inspirer le changement, contribuer à rendre plus libre le peuple; mais il n’était pas un système que l’on devait simplement appliquer au Bas-Canada pour régler tous ses problèmes, sans égard à l’histoire, aux traditions, à la réalité particulière de ses habitants. Mais, malgré cela (et pour d’autres motifs), Papineau, d’une incroyable constance intellectuelle, fut considéré, à compter des années 1840, comme trop « radical » : les temps, au Canada, n’étaient plus aux sympathies républicaines ouvertement affichées. Cela, aussi, nous en dit beaucoup sur le climat politique de l’époque. 

Avez-vous lu quelque chose de bon récemment ? 

Je viens tout juste de terminer deux excellents livres: Récit d’une émigration de Fernand Dumont (1997), et Gabrielle Roy, une vie (1996), de François Ricard. Le livre de Dumont, qui constitue en fait ses mémoires, est fascinant, rempli de finesse. On y comprend mieux le déchirement qu’il a ressenti en quittant son modeste milieu d’origine pour intégrer le milieu universitaire. Cette experience traverse l’oeuvre sociologique de Dumont, toute tournée vers l’exploration des rapports entre ce qu’il appelle la culture première et la culture seconde. Dumont a fait le choix intellectuel, épistémologique, de réfléchir à partir de cette tension qui l’habite, et non pas malgré elle, ce que je trouve admirable. Du côté de la biographie que François Ricard a écrite de Gabrielle Roy, j’ai été impressionné par son écriture élégante et par sa maîtrise de l’oeuvre de l’écrivaine. On ressent, certes, tout l’attachement du biographe envers Roy, c’est-à-dire envers la personne qu’il a personnellement connue et l’œuvre qu’il a toujours admirée; mais Ricard a aussi souvent une manière très pénétrante de critiquer et celle-ci, et celle-là. À mon avis, Ricard sert avec cet ouvrage une belle leçon d’écriture biographique.