On the back of blackness: contemporary Canadian blackface and the consumptive production of post-racialist, white Canadian subjects

Howard, Philip S. S.

doi:10.1080/13504630.2017.1281113

Cited by 12 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Notes 1. Howard (2018) touched upon the impact of the history of minstrelsy in the United States on contemporary Canadian Blackface. In this article Howard noted that Cool Runnings, its popularity, and that popularity inspired re-enactments by White fans.…”

Section: The Devil Finds Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The devil finds leisure

Mowatt

2020

Annals of Leisure Research

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In 1976, James Baldwin's The Devil Finds Work is published, a scathingly telling piece of cinematic critique at the height of exploitation and the ongoing efforts of the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). Prior to that in 1963, Baldwin had published The Fire Next Time, a poignant letter to a nephew on the state of America in the midst of eventual civil unrest. What is presented is a fictionalized letter to a family member that takes the reader through a day-in-the-life of a racialised self within a society that does the work of racialising through forms of leisure entertainment, all in the midst of a pandemic and global civil unrest. Within that day, Baldwin's work serves as the inspiration for this recollection and criticism, as very little has been discussed about fiction as entertainment for consumption and the implications of this consumption. Here, the devil finds leisure as much as work.

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Section: The Devil Finds Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The devil finds leisure

Mowatt

2020

Annals of Leisure Research

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“…For Black people specifically, evidence of our long presence here since the 1600s is actively erased both materially and symbolically (Walcott, 2001: 128–129), and the smack of Canadian slavery persists through the multiple mechanisms by which Black labour is appropriated to build the nation, while Black people simultaneously experience barriers to citizenship through Canadian labour and immigration law (Bashi, 2004; Calliste, 1994; Lawson, 2013). Ironically, however, the erasure of the history of Canadian slavery and the accompanying selective historical accounts of the Underground Railroad to Canada have been important ways to construct Canada as beyond racism (Cooper, 2006; Howard, 2018). These trends, then, make Canada ideologically postracialist—that is, it functions through racialized social relations while denying and claiming to have overcome them (Goldberg, 2009, 2012).…”

Section: Part 1: Theoretical Framingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A laugh for the national project: Contemporary Canadian blackface humour and its constitution through Canadian anti-blackness

Howard

2018

Ethnicities

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This article investigates the ways that the ostensible humour associated with contemporary blackface incidents in Canada is constituted. It argues that the conditions of possibility for contemporary Canadian blackface humour are an anti-black libidinal economy dependent upon the tropes of biological racism, and a socially embedded, psychic association of the Black body with pleasure that was entrenched through slavery’s relations of domination. With the specificities of anti-blackness in view, this article refines Simon Weaver’s concept, embodied racism, to emphasize that it is a form of biological racism that has historically targeted Black people, and continues to do so today. Then, building upon these foundations, I argue that contemporary Canadian blackface humour is constituted and intensified by the specific racialized social relations in Canada, such as its postracialist claim to being racially egalitarian, and the ways it mobilizes multiculturalist discourse to make Blackness perpetually foreign and out-of-place in Canada—matters that, in part, characterize the contemporary Canadian colonial project. The article therefore suggests that making clear these ways in which contemporary Canadian blackface is only legible as humour through racialized social relations is a necessary component of challenging suggestions that blackface is harmless, non-racial humour.

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The Education System of Canada: Multiculturalism, Multicultural Education, and Racialized Students in Canada

James

Howard

2021

Global Education Systems

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On the back of blackness: contemporary Canadian blackface and the consumptive production of post-racialist, white Canadian subjects

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

The devil finds leisure

The devil finds leisure

A laugh for the national project: Contemporary Canadian blackface humour and its constitution through Canadian anti-blackness

The Education System of Canada: Multiculturalism, Multicultural Education, and Racialized Students in Canada

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