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

Abstract

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.

Why Shouldn’t Race Be a Costume?―A (Qualified) Defense of Wearing Cross-Racial Make-Up During Halloween

“…For this to occur, Phillip S.S. Howard has argued, such mockery need not be intended if this means that those who darken their face as part of personal costumes must be fully aware of the mockery's existence; focusing on the Canadian context, he thus writes that the "humour of contemporary Canadian blackface" may, and sometimes, does, go "largely unexamined." 25 As it happens, contemporary critics of crossracial uses of black makeup have not laid too much emphasis on the current objection. The reason seems to be that most think that such uses always mock black people, meaning that there is no way in which they can be part of crossracial impersonations that are respectful of members of this group.…”

“…28 Still, some of them acknowledge that there can be "stereotypical accoutrements" present in crossracial uses of black makeup-Howard mentions among other things the portrayal of joints-that independently ridicule black people and thereby amplify the perceived wrongfulness of what almost all of these critics refer to as the "wearing of blackface." 29 Bracketing for now the possibility that donning crossracial makeup in general or black makeup in particular is wrong regardless of the specific form it takes (I will consider this possibility later), one immediate response to the current objection is that there certainly are cases where crossracial makeup is used as part of crossracial impersonations that mock the members of the imitated races. For example, in 2007, American comedian Sarah Silverman played a black person as part of a sketch for which she had painted her face unnaturally dark in addition to having made her lips seem unnaturally large using white makeup, which resulted in an impersonation that was reminiscent of the dehumanizing blackface characters enacted during North American minstrel shows.…”

Representasi ideologi supremasi kulit putih dalam iklan televisi

“…Penggambaran ras kulit hitam tidak hanya dengan penggunaan cat minyak hitam tetapi coklat juga termasuk dalam blackface (Howard, 2018 Sebaliknya, seseorang yang memiliki ciri fisik berkulit gelap, berambut kriting, wajah bulat, dan perawakan gempal justru dianggap aneh (Storey, 2018). Adanya anggapan aneh itu pula yang menjadikan blackface dalam iklan Bukalapak ini sebagai tokoh sentral.…”

Expanding the Frameworks for Decolonial Social Work Practice: A Case Study of Black Canadian Experiences

“…Connecting Indigeneity and ani-Blackness in their analysis of settler colonialism, Rowe and Tuck (2017) also define the term as "the theft of people from their homelands (in Africa) to become property of settlers to stolen land" (p. 4). Despite Canada's continual denial and assumed distance from the institution of slavery, the country has a 206-yearold history of slavery (Howard, 2018) and this reality, frames ongoing anti-Black racism in this country.…”