Category: Interviews

Suzanna Wagner is an independent scholar, focusing on Canadian health history between 1890 and 1930. She is currently the Historic Sites Program Coordinator with the Government of Alberta. She is the author of “Households Large and Small: Healthcare Civilians and the Prominence of Women’s Work in the Edmonton Bulletin’s Reporting of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic ”. You can read her article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2 (2022).

Your work focuses on the history of health between 1890 and 1930. How did you come to be interested in this period?

It all started with a job I didn’t want. In the midst of my undergrad, I got a much-coveted summer job working at a living history site. I campaigned for a position focused on the fur trade – but was instead assigned the 1920s. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Fortunately, it didn’t take very long before I became intrigued by the diversity and contradictions of the 1920s in Western Canada. The juxtaposition of modern technologies with time-honoured technologies, the dramatic differences between rural and urban life, the many and varied situations of women and especially the post-war experiences intrigued me.

I found the stories of the First World War Canadian Army Medical Corps Nursing Sisters so fascinating that I went to grad school to investigate further. This resulted in a thesis that considered the nursing sisters’ work in Greece and Egypt from 1915-1917. As I read about the social and healthcare/nursing landscape from which these nursing sisters came and their post-war legacy, I found more and more intriguing histories including public health infrastructure development, material histories, and changing healthcare attitudes and practices. So, I ended up focusing on healthcare and social history from 1890 to 1930.

In your conclusion, you say that “for a time after the crisis passed the value of that care […] was acknowledged and praised”. What would you say was the long term effect of the increased importance given to domestic labour?

I wish I could say that there was a long-term effect, but at this point at least, I’m not convinced that domestic labour or care-work were publicly appreciated in any significant way once Edmonton had gotten over the worst of the influenza. Nor does it appear that the prominence of domestic labour and care-work during the epidemic changed the way this labour was experienced or considered afterwards.
Given both the timing of the epidemic and that care-work and domestic labour were (and still are) highly gendered activities, this query could be tied to the question of whether women’s work in the First World War did anything to advance their claims to equal rights, suffrage and opportunities afterwards.

While there are a range of answers to the latter, in both cases, it seems that the desire for a return to normalcy encouraged people to push back on anything tangible and controllable that had changed. For instance, while it was out of Edmontonians’ power to bring back those who died, they could stop talking about laundry in the newspaper. Taking small steps to return to normalcy had the side effect- likely unintended and perhaps not even initially observed- of pushing domestic labour back into the confines of private homes and out of public view.

Regardless of how hidden the work may be, exploring the practicalities of daily life remains vital because it allows us to get a better sense of the diversities of lived experiences. More recently, COVID has once again demonstrated that domestic burdens can disproportionately affect women. It’s a timely reminder of the basic importance of studying these issues.

What were the main challenges you encountered in primarily working with the Edmonton Bulletin newspaper?

You mean aside from blurry printing? I shouldn’t complain- the Edmonton Bulletin has been digitized and is keyword searchable.

The limited demographic focus of the paper’s writing was a challenge. The Edmonton Bulletin certainly illuminates the impressions and experiences of the elite of the city well, but overall it provides incomplete impression of Edmonton’s population in 1918. I was struck, for example, by the scant references to Catholic institutions and clergy. I’m currently working on research that will help to sketch out this part of the Edmonton influenza story.

The biggest remaining question for me at this point surrounds the internal workings of the newspaper. I would like to have had more information about the Edmonton Bulletin’s writers and how their work was influenced by the epidemic.

Where is your research headed now?

Out east (of Edmonton)! I’ve started to investigate how the 1918 influenza affected rural populations in the east-central part of Alberta, including the Ukrainian bloc settlement area. The experience was markedly different than what we see in Edmonton and is important to help us understand the ethnic dynamics at play during the influenza epidemic.

I’m also expanding my research on Canadian military nursing sisters of the First World War in several separate directions simultaneously, prompted by questions I wasn’t able to address in my thesis and the discovery of some exciting new primary sources!

Have you read anything good recently?

I’m in the middle of two fascinating books right now: The Culture of Flushing: A Social and Legal History of Sewage by Jamie Benidickson (UBC Press) and Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast by Jan Hare and Jean Barman (UBC Press).

I’ve long been intrigued by the development of sewers and public health policies, so when I saw The Culture of Flushing on sale, I added it to my cart without so much as a second thought. Good Intentions Gone Awry was another impulse purchase: it seemed appropriate for grappling with some of Canada’s tragic histories while simultaneously gaining a more well-rounded understanding of the role of Protestant women in missionary work. The book uses the letters of Emma Crosby, a late 19th century Methodist missionary(’s wife) alongside commentary from Hare and Barman to paint a vivid picture of the thought world which supported the missionary work, the peculiarities of white women’s work and experience of missionary callings of as well as the tragic, if unintended, consequences of these efforts.

Rachel Hope Cleves is a Professor at the University of Victoria. Her work focuses on American history, particularly through a gender and sexuality lens. Her book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America was also a finalist for the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize. Her latest work Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality won the 2021 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize and is the subject of a roundatable in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2.

How did you come to this project about Norman Douglas?

This project originated in the archives, like most of my books and articles have. In 2014, I went on a family vacation to Capri and during the trip I decided to read one of the most famous novels set on the island, Norman Douglas’s 1917 South Wind. The novel satirizes the sexually transgressive cosmopolitan elite who lived in Capri at the turn of the twentieth century. Reading South Wind made me curious about the historical figures who inspired the novel, so I tracked down Douglas’s 1933 memoir Looking Back. The memoir is a minor modernist masterpiece, but it is also shockingly forthright about Douglas’s sexual relationships with youth, both female and male. Looking Back made me question how attitudes towards intergenerational sex in the early twentieth century differed from present attitudes; a famous author could publish a memoir in the 1930s about having sexual encounters with children and was still widely admired, something of course unimaginable today. I followed that question to the New York Public Library, where many of Douglas’s manuscripts are archived. There I discovered his travel diaries, which included explicit descriptions of his encounters with youths. Although I hadn’t been planning on writing a book about Douglas (my plans were to integrate him briefly into a different book project), as a historian of sexuality I felt an immediate responsibility to bring Douglas’s diaries to light. They offered a rare window onto the widespread practice of sex between men and children or youth in the first half of the twentieth century. A lot of work on the history of pederasty has drawn from legal records or from cultural texts like poetry, art, and pornography. Douglas’s travel diaries offered a highly unusual social historical dimension to the conversation. I knew a book seeking to understand this world would alienate a lot of readers, but to not shine a light on what I had discovered would, I thought, make me complicit in covering up the history of intergenerational sex. As a tenured professor, I was willing to take the risk of writing on a topic that I was fairly certain would generate significant backlash.

You worked with a number of sources such as diaries, letters and police records for this project, including some produced by the children Douglas encountered. What were the biggest challenges you encountered in studying children’s and youth’s perspectives on such a fraught and difficult subject?

The key challenge I faced was how to interpret the letters and diaries by Douglas’s boys that expressed love and affection for him. The book would have been far more palatable if I didn’t have those sources. If I had been left only with silences, I would have been able to fill the silences with assumptions based on our present trauma model of child abuse. But the evidence didn’t support the claim that the children saw their relations with Douglas as traumatic. That raised a new question: were the children suffering from false consciousness? Should I interpret their affection for Douglas, which often extended throughout their adult lives, as akin to Stockholm Syndrome? To make that argument would put me in conflict with one of the major tenets of the history of childhood: that we ought to take seriously the words and actions of children. I didn’t want to erase the agency of these historical children by overwriting their own words with my modern adult assumptions. On the other hand, judging from the evidence it was clear to me that Douglas’s sexual encounters with children were exploitative and harmful. I didn’t want to let him off the hook as a moral actor by uncritically accepting the children’s declarations of affection. I had to analyze the sources in light of their material context. Douglas represented a source of material opportunity for poor children and youth, and they often had instrumental reasons for expressing affection for him. Material interests, however, could not explain away all of the evident affection the children held for Douglas. I had to acknowledge that many experienced their relationships with him as beneficial, even if I didn’t see it that way. To handle these complexities, I introduced multiple lines of analysis in the reflection sections at the end of each of the book’s four parts. I raised the possibility that childhood experiences of intergenerational sex might differ over time and place depending on historical contexts including material circumstances and dominant ideologies, while also giving evidence of the very real damage that Douglas caused to the people around him.

How did you approach the need to historicize the subject of your scholarship against contemporary understandings of child abuse?

As a historian of sexuality, I remain committed to the axiom that the meaning of sex and sexual practices change over time and place. I am skeptical of any claims to a transhistorical sexual morality. Our contemporary understandings of child abuse, however, treat sexual encounters between adults and children as a universal wrong. Our taboo conflicts with a historicist understanding of intergenerational sex as having shifting historical meanings. For this book, I had to ask the question of whether it was possible that before the rise of the contemporary taboo on pedophilia in the 1950s, sexual encounters with adults held different meanings for children and youth. Just by asking this question I know that I alienate many historians of childhood who tend to feel protective of their subjects. On the other hand, at talks I’ve given about Douglas I have been approached many times by adults who were sexually abused as children who have told me that the contemporary trauma model feels reductive or restrictive to them. They express appreciation for my attention to children’s agency in Unspeakable.

Where is your research headed now?

I am finally back at work on the project I had started before Norman Douglas dragooned me: a history of the connections between good food and illicit sex in the Anglo imagination between the late eighteenth century and the present day. Initially, I thought Douglas might take up a page or two of this project, since he was a well-known epicure who often linked food and sex in his writings. His final, posthumous, book was a tongue-in-cheek collection of aphrodisiac recipes titled Venus in the Kitchen (1952). As I mentioned above, my discoveries in the archives made me feel ethically compelled to write a book about Douglas, even though I knew it would be unwelcome. Now that Douglas is behind me, I’ve returned to the far more appetizing task of tracing how the connections between food and sex have changed over time. Look for a new book from me, to be published by Polity, a few years down the line.

Have you read anything good recently?

I’m always reading good things! I’ve been teaching a graduate seminar in U.S. history this semester, organized around the theme of recent books that have won multiple awards. What a joy! We’ve read Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2018); Douglas Winiarski, Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England (2019); Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor and Longing in French Louisiana (2019); Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (2018); Joanne Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (2018); Amy Murrell Taylor, Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps (2018); Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018); Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2022); Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018); and Gary Gerstle The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022). Is that too many books to recommend?

Nicole Demarchi is a PhD candidate in medieval history. She is enrolled in a joint program at the University of Padua, Ca’Foscari Venice, University of Verona, and University of Lorraine. She is currently working on the role of emotions and pain in the works of Paul the Deacon. She is the author of “Between Expiatory Religious Processions and Individual Escapes: Responses to Bubonic Plague Epidemics in the Historiae of Gregory of Tours and Paul the Deacon”. You can read her article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no. 2 (2022).

Your work largely focuses on the role of emotions and pain in Paul the Deacon’s writings. How did you come to this topic?

In a totally random way. During my master’s degree in philosophy, I took a course on the philosophy of emotions and the professor recommended Barbara Rosenwein’s books. I immediately became so fascinated with the history of emotions that I combined this new interest with that of early medieval history in my PhD project. I decide to study pain – as an emotion – for two main reasons: the first one is that the experience of pain plays a central role in Paul the Deacon’s life and works. The second reason has to do with the fact that currently there is relatively limited research on the role of pain in the early medieval context. I think studying pain as a historical phenomenon is important because it helps us understand not only how it has been conceptualized, expressed, and judged differently, but also how the pain of certain marginalized social groups has been rejected and ridiculed by dominant elites throughout history.

You stress the need for a comparative approach to be taken when studying the responses to plague outbreaks in Western Europe, which is what you set out to do in this article. How did you go about choosing your main sources for this study?

I became intrigued by the subject of individual and collective responses to plague epidemics by reading Paul the Deacon’s accounts on plague during the first Italian lockdown in 2020. This theme is not the main focus of my doctoral thesis, but it inevitably caught my attention. I thought: what do Paul and other early medieval authors tell us about how people dealt with epidemics in the past? So, I decided to compare Paul’s reports on plague with those of one of his main sources, namely Gregory of Tours, who lived in a completely different political, social, and cultural context. I think that this comparative approach between authors who are chronologically distant but somehow interconnected through textual references is very promising.

In your conclusion, you mention the difficulty in obtaining a complete picture of attitudes towards plague during this period given a lack of non-elite perspectives. Both authors you focus on are religious leaders. How did you deal with this hurdle in your analysis?

I think a good starting point is to read historical sources critically. This means asking questions about the author’s agenda, the structure and purpose of the text, and the context in which a text was written. Being aware that an author’s plague narrative is influenced by his political, religious, and pedagogical aims is essential to understanding why he represented plague responses in a certain way rather than another. This critical reading of historical sources also avoids generalizing the author’s claims, as he can only offer us a specific perspective on plague outbreaks.

According to Paul the Deacon, in 589 the river Tiber flooded Rome, damaging ancient buildings as well as the church granaries where thousands of bushels of grain were stored, causing famine. The flood also spawned swarms of snakes (multitudo serpentium) and an enormous dragon (magnus draco). What do you think this dragon was?

The presence of a dragon/snake during the flood of 589 is reported not only by Paul the Deacon, but also by Gregory of Tours (Paul’s main source) and John the Deacon. It is even mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis. Many scholars have argued about the religious and cultural significance that Gregory attributed to the dragon/snake. For example, Alain J. Stoclet have identified the dragon with the pagan God Asclepius. The exodus of the reptiles (Asclepius and his snake servants) would represent the banishment of paganism from the city of Rome. Martin Heinzelmann has suggested that the dragon and serpents in Gregory’s account may be understood as apocalyptic omens. Therefore, the dragon and snakes seem to be part of a complex interpretative framework that draws on pagan historiography and Christian symbolism.

Where is your research headed now?

In recent months I have been focusing on the role of love, affection, and intimacy in family relationships, with a particular emphasis on the Carolingian era. I became interested in these issues during my doctoral research when I examined the epitaphs written by Paul the Deacon for the three infant children of Charlemagne and his wife Hildegard. I was impressed by the fact that the epitaphs include many emotional expressions related to family affection and parental grieving. Thus, I decided to extend this initial analysis to other texts produced by different authors who worked at the court of Charlemagne and his successors. Currently I am still examining the primary sources, but I hope that soon I will be able to compare them to get a clearer overall picture of the role of intimacy in the Carolingian royal family.

Have you read anything good recently?

I am reading How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa F. Barrett. Barrett, a neuroscientist and psychologist, argues that many of the main beliefs we have about emotions are wrong. She argues that it is not true that emotions are universal, that they are hardwired and automatically triggered in distinct regions of the brain, and that emotions look the same everywhere. For example, just because someone smiles, it does not necessarily mean they are happy. Our emotions are not innate. Instead, they are a construction made by the relationship between the brain, our interpretations of bodily sensations, and the external environment. Thus, culture plays a fundamental role in learning and constructing our emotional concepts. As a historian who deals with emotions, I really enjoyed reading this book because it provides another piece of evidence to support the theory that emotions – and the way they are experienced, expressed and understood – can change over time and according to culture.

jason chalmers is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University. His work deals with decolonization and memory from a Jewish perspective. He is the author of “Decolonizing the Holocaust: Curatorial Possibilities at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.”. You can read his article in JCHA/RSHC 32 no.2 (2022).

Your work primarily deals with decolonization and memory from a Jewish perspective. How did you become interested in this area of research?

I find research most exciting when it brings together unexpected and ostensibly unconnected areas of knowledge. My interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust memory has developed quite organically. My maternal grandparents are Holocaust survivors who came to Canada as war orphans in 1948, and I grew up hearing my grandmother’s experiences of survival. Her story was published as Buried Words by the Azrieli Foundation. This area of research is very personal to me and I was drawn to it more by instinct than conscious decision.

In contrast, my interest in settler colonialism and decolonization was more intentional. Canada is characterized by an interesting paradox: while the country was created through settler colonialism, the state is also invested in the denial of colonial violence. As a consequence, Canadians are surrounded by colonial violence but often unaware of it. Yet the onus of decolonization and reconciliation falls largely onto settler society, so I feel a distinct responsibility to do this work.

While completing my dissertation, I realized that colonial violence is often a blind spot for Holocaust studies, and I wondered how I might address this blindness. I thought that by bringing together these two areas of scholarship, I can help to make the invisible visible.

What challenges did you face in conducting primary research?

A big challenge is that very few Holocaust museums are willing to have meaningful conversations about settler colonialism. There seem to be a few reasons for this. I think that most Holocaust museums don’t see these issues as relevant to their mandates, so they don’t feel the need to open up dialogue about colonialism and decolonization. But I also think people are resistant to these conversations because they are so difficult and uncomfortable – because these issues challenge people to think about themselves and the world in new ways. So I was faced with a dilemma: How can I have a conversation when others are reluctant to join in? And it’s this reluctance that compels my research. My article attempts to show that issues of settler colonialism, decolonization, and Indigeneity are relevant to Holocaust museums. I want to show that the Montreal Holocaust Museum and similar institutions are not only capable of addressing these issues, but that they need to have these conversations.

Memorial room in the Montreal Holocaust Museum, Montreal QC

You discuss the construction of the Holocaust as Canadian memory. Can you elaborate on this?

Holocaust memory is a seed that flowers differently in different environments. In places like Poland, for example, where the actual killings took place, Holocaust memory focuses on the physical sites of destruction but also the contemporary absence of Jews. In Israel, there is often emphasis on narratives of redemption and homecoming. In places like Canada and Australia, which absorbed tens-of-thousands of survivors after the war, memory turns towards stories of survival, arrival, integration, and home-building. One consequence is that Canadians tend to remember the Holocaust in a way that is shaped by colonial ideologies, mythologies, power relations, and modes of representation. Holocaust museums, monuments, and memorials can therefore be informative sites of analysis that illuminate both transnational memory as well as socio-political dynamics in specific places.

You state in your article that decolonization is “an ongoing process without a clear end in sight”. What kind of challenges does this pose in your research?

This is an absolutely crucial point. Decolonization is a horizon that we can always approach but never quite arrive at. This of course poses a challenge to researchers, curators, and heritage experts, but also to Canadians in general. It is a challenge to critically reflect on ourselves, the places we live, and our relationships to one another. It is a challenge to think about the state, social institutions, and the ways they reproduce structural and systemic inequality. To settlers in particular, it is a challenge to restore Indigenous land and sovereignty.

Another implication is that my research will likely (or hopefully) be outdated in the near future. Compared to some other institutions, the Montreal Holocaust Museum hasn’t taken many steps towards decolonization. As such, the recommendations I offer are only the tip of the iceberg; my intent is to inspire conversation, provoke action, and provide a framework for future developments. Why not translate the exhibit into Kanien’kéha or other Indigenous languages, for example? I hope that when the Montreal Holocaust Museum re-opens with its new permanent exhibit in 2025, my article will be obsolete and we will already be navigating more radical conversations about decolonization.

How does your work engage with other recent work in Canada about decolonization?

This area of research is interesting because people define decolonization in so many different ways. If you ask ten people what decolonization means, I suspect you’d hear ten unique but equally insightful responses. One place where I engage in these conversations is with the Thinking Through the Museum (TTTM) research network based out of Concordia University, which takes a critical approach to museums and difficult histories. My colleagues at TTTM are a great source of wisdom and inspiration in thinking through decolonization and related processes. It is a particularly productive environment because TTTM includes scholars, heritage professionals, and artists from Canada as well as Poland, South Africa, and the United States. As such, it helps me approach settler colonialism and decolonization from a Canadian perspective while also addressing other national contexts.

Is this article part of a larger project?

This article is part of my postdoctoral research at Concordia University. I began to ask these questions in an article I published in American Indian Quarterly, which considers how the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa reproduces settler mythology. I received an enthusiastic response from scholars working in Holocaust and genocide studies, and it seemed like a fruitful direction for my research. I have a related article coming out in Canadian Jewish Studies that explores how Jewish community archives are responding to reconciliation.

National Holocaust Monument, Ottawa ON

Alberta’s provincial Holocaust memorial, Edmonton AB

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. 

Sydney Harker is a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Dr. Jane Errington and Dr. Laila Haidarali at Queen’s University. Her current research examines how categories of beauty were employed and understood in Ontario from the mid to late nineteenth century. She is the co-author of “A Complex Faith: Strategies of Marriage, Family and Community Among Upper Canadian Quakers,1784-1830.” (2021). You can read her article ” ‘A Galaxy of Youth and Beauty’ : Beauty Entertainment in Late Victorian Ontario” in JCHA/RSHC issue 32 no.1.

How did you become interested in the history of beauty contests and beauty standards? 

My interest in beauty stemmed from an exhibit on Canadian immigration texts curated by Kim Bell at W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections library in 2019. Included was a Canada West: The Last Best West magazine from 1911 where the cover illustration was a Gibson Girl-esque figure holding a bushel of wheat. The image was incredibly similar to a popular 1910 photograph of actress Billie Burke. I was struck by the use of beauty to romanticize and promote an idealized agricultural society in western Canada and from there I started reading as much beauty history as I could. It was a departure from the work I expected to do, but I’m grateful to my supervisors for supporting me.  

Your article discusses that there was a class distinction between certain kinds of beauty entertainment and the women who participated in them. How strict were these kinds of boundaries? Did they have similar understandings of beauty or were the women involved judged with different criteria? 

The boundaries were fairly strict, but context of place was very important. Women who performed in theatrical beauty shows and on stage were paid performers who generally came from urban working-class backgrounds. There was a degree of anonymity to these women that was not present at local beauty contests, where contestants were pulled from a middle-class audience and the events were often community based. We get a sense of this from newspaper announcements that named local winners but never named participants in theatrical beauty shows unless they were a well-known performer. As far as understandings of beauty go, beauty contests generally upheld western standards of beauty, though beauty shows often capitalized on a growing interest in showing “foreign” forms of beauty, driven in part by late nineteenth century interest in Orientalism. This is where we see the introduction of beauty “types” and advertisements that used loaded terms such as international, or a congress of beauties.  

Your article discusses how beauty contests became tied to nationalism. Could you expand on that in relation to Canada’s role as a settler state?  

A lot of excellent work has been done on the connection between beauty contests and nationalism, particularly in the twentieth century. What we see happening on a smaller scale in the late nineteenth century is the use of beauty contests as a form of civic pride where contests were included at public events to promote a particular vision of a city or town. There is a striking scene relayed in the Perth Courier of a 1903 agricultural fair in New Liskeard (today Temiskaming Shores) where author J. M. Walker discusses the “throbbing of a distant kettledrum and the strains of ‘Hiawatha’ play[ing]” at the fair where a beauty contest was held. 1903 was the same year the town was incorporated, and construction began on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, so there were big economic and settlement plans for New Liskeard. The area was the traditional territory of the Algonquin, notably the Wabigijic (Wabie) family. Madeline Theriault, who was part of the Temagami First Nation, wrote in her autobiography, Moose to Moccasins: The Story of Ka Kita Wa Po No Kwe, that her great-great grandparents, Joachim and Angèle Wabigijic, were living in the area that later became New Liskeard and were forced from their land (26). In an edited version of land surveyor A. H. Telfer’s travel diaries, Worth Travelling Miles to See: Diary of a Survey Trip to Lake Temiskaming, 1886, editor Lorene DiCorpo details attempts by Joachim and Angèle’s daughter Nancy Wabie from 1917 to 1934 to gain compensation from the Canadian government for her father’s land in New Liskeard (135-144). This is important because the scene at the fair described by Walker is an interesting conjunction of highly stylized Indigenous presence and imagery at a settler event that also held a stylized beauty contest. It is an evocative and stark image of cultural and symbolic settler appropriation as the backdrop of a beauty contest where only settler women participated. The contest was a way to communicate the pride and vision of the town and its settlers, denoting who belonged in New Liskeard and who was to be celebrated.

“The Night Owls beauty show,” 1892, priJLC_ENT_000231, courtesy of the Jay T. Last Collection of Graphic Arts and Social History, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p16003coll4/id/2389/

Your article discusses the role that the press had in creating beauty standards used in Victorian beauty contests. Do you think that social media could have a similar effect on how we perceive our bodies?  

This is a big question. Social media is certainly a heightened medium of communicating beauty standards and decentralized in the sense that the agents of influence (or influencers) go far beyond the late Victorian era socialites and stage actresses, and beauty and body trends move a lot faster. Because the type of social media we see is broadly shaped by how we use it, it can introduce people to understandings of their bodies that challenge hegemonic beauty standards and create ideas of beauty that fall outside of the dominant system. At the same time, most of us are at the whim of the algorithm when it comes to what content is prioritized and put in front of us, perpetuating certain beauty and body ideals that ostracizes and harms anyone who fails to present as or perform within largely held standards of thinness, whiteness, and ability.  

Have you read anything interesting lately? 

I recently picked up Ada Limón’s The Hurting Kind (2022). It’s a compelling collection of poems that feels the right amount of hopeful for the moment.