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.