Making Sense of White Audience Reactions to Blackface Performances on Halifax Stages (1830s–1860s): Diverging and Shifting Notions of Whiteness and Entrenching Anti-Black Racism.

This article examines the evolving reactions of White audiences and newspaper reviewers in nineteenth-century Halifax, Nova Scotia, to blackface performances between the mid-1830s and early 1860s. Initially, local critics—aligned with the city’s cultural elite—were highly critical of blackface shows, condemning them for failing to meet prevailing standards of respectable and morally uplifting entertainment, while broader White audiences, likely including many working-class Irish Catholics, enthusiastically supported these performances. Over time, reviewers’ attitudes softened as blackface troupes adapted their acts to include more musically refined and structured programs, gaining a degree of reluctant acceptance despite the genre’s inherently racist caricatures of Black people. The article situates these shifting responses within Halifax’s unique racial and social context, marked by close White-Black proximity, entrenched anti-Black racism, and contested notions of Whiteness, arguing that the press’s eventual approval helped legitimize and reinforce racial prejudice in the city.