Longbefore Canada had a national broadcaster or any mandate to promote its ownculture, its stages were already shaping how Canadians saw race -- and, just asoften, undermining it. Staging Blackface in Canada uncovers atwenty-year period, roughly 1898 to 1919, when the same Canadian stages thatstaged blackface and ethnic caricature also hosted some of the first Blackmusicals and operas the country had ever seen, sometimes within the sametheatre, the same season. Thiswas an era when Canada had no professional theatre industry of its own.Instead, the stage borrowed its themes from amusement parks, social dancehalls, the new technology of recorded music -- and blackface travelled with it,reshaping burlesque, comic opera, and variety shows into a popularentertainment that drew white, Anglo-Protestant, English-speaking audiences inthe thousands, even as it drew criticism in its own time. Drawing on theatrical reviews, images, andarchival records from a period with no media regulation and no official storyabout Canadian identity, this book traces how popular entertainment became oneof the main venues where Canadians imitated, mocked, and occasionally reckonedwith race while Black performers created stages of their own in the middle ofit all.