1 Jon Kaplan, ‘Dynamically Diverse Company Spices up Cultural Stew’, available at http://thesharonlewis.com/review_sistahs.html, accessed 14 November 2008. Kaplan's review, which appeared initially in Now Magazine in 1994, notes that playwrights Bailey and Lewis also remarked upon the word ‘sugar’ as a signifier of black enslavement in the Caribbean.

2 Hall, Stuart, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Rutherford, Jonathan, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishcart, 1990), pp. 222–37Google Scholar.

3 Since 1990 more Africans have voluntarily moved to the United States than were imported into the country before the official close of the slave trade in 1807. See Sam Roberts, ‘More Africans Enter the U.S. than in Days of Slavery’, New York Times, 21 February 2005, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/nyregion/21africa.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=21%20February%202005&st=cse&scp=2, accessed 14 December 2009.

4 Robin Breon, ‘Show Boat: The Revival, the Racism’, Drama Review, 39, 2 (T146) (Summer 1995), pp. 86–105; Leslie Sanders, ‘American Scripts, Canadian Realities: Toronto's Show Boat’, Diaspora, 5, 1 (1996), pp. 99–117. As both Breon and Sanders note, Show Boat has engendered charges of racism since its 1927 premiere, and each major revival has attempted to counter those allegations by revising the script in accordance, finally with then-dominant (that is, white) perspectives.

5 Sanders, ‘American Scripts, Canadian Realities’, p. 107.

6 Ibid., pp. 111–12.

7 Actor James Earl Jones did radio voice-overs, while Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr authored a teacher's guide that was used by school systems on both sides of the Canadian–US border in preparation for their theatre outings. See Sanders, ‘American Scripts, Canadian Realities’, n. 6, in which she relates the impossibility of obtaining a copy of that guide from school systems, Livent officials or Gates's offices.

8 Anonymous, ‘Show Boat Wows U.S. Black Media’, Globe and Mail [Toronto] (22 October, 1994); cited in Sanders.

9 Sharon M. Lewis, ‘Rocking the Show Boat’, Winter 1993–4 Fuse, available at http://thesharonlewis.com/writer_fuse.html, accessed 28 November 2009.

10 As M. Nourbese Philip documents in Showing Grit: Showboating North of the 44th Parallel (Toronto: Poui Publications, 1993), that local history included the 1992 Yonge Sreet riots, that erupted in the wake of aggressive police response to protests against the killing of a black youth just days after the police acquittal in the Rodney King case in the United States, and the Royal Ontario Museum's provocative 1989–90 Into the Heart of Africa exhibit in which postmodern exhibition strategies seemingly operated so as to reaffirm racist, colonial collecting practices.

11 On the appeal of black American culture see, for example, Clarke, George Elliott, ‘Embarkation: Discovering African-Canadian Literature’, in idem, ed., Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 3–6Google Scholar; or Walcott, Rinaldo, Black Like Who? Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

12 Davis, Andrea, ‘Healing in the Kitchen: Women's Performance as Rituals of Change’, in Sears, Djanet, ed., Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2000), Vol. I, p. 279Google Scholar. Originally published by Canada Press in 1994 as a single-play edition, Sistahs is anthologized in Testifyin’, pp. 281–328. All references are to this edition.

13 ‘Canada's Ethnocultural Mosaic, 2006 Census: National Picture, Visible Minority Population Surpasses 5-million Mark’, available at http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-562/p5-eng.cfm, accessed 2 June 2009. ‘Visible minorities’ under the Employment Equity Act are ‘persons, other than Aboriginals, who are non-Caucasian in race and non-white in colour’. Jane Badets, ‘Update on Cultural Diversity’, Statistics Canada catalogue 11–008 (Autumn 2003), available at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2003002/article/6623-eng.pdf, accessed 30 October 2009.

14 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, p. 28.

15 Ibid.

16 ‘New Internationalist, PERLINK’, http://www.newint.org/features/1980/12/01/oil-money/, accessed 2 June 2009.

17 M. Jacqui Alexander, ‘Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas’, Feminist Review, 48 (Autumn 1994), pp. 5–23.

18 Ann Milan and Kelly Tran, ‘Blacks in Canada: A Long History’, p. 4, available at http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2003004/article/6802-eng.pdf, accessed 20 June 2009.

19 Clarke, Odysseys Home, p. 15.

20 Bharucha, Rustom, The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 8–10Google Scholar.

21 Bailey and Lewis, Sistahs, p. 299.

22 Kapsalis, Terry, ‘Mastering the Female Pelvis: Race and the Tools of Reproduction’, in Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, ed., Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), pp. 263–300, here p. 264Google Scholar.

23 Roberts, Dorothy, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997)Google Scholar. A contraceptive device in which capsules are inserted under a woman's skin to prevent ovulation for up to five years, Norplant was introduced in the United States and the United Kingdom in 1990 and withdrawn from those markets little more than ten years later because of women's complaints concerning side effects; it is, however, still in use in parts of the global South.

24 Bailey and Lewis, Sistahs, p. 305.

25 The history of Africville in Halifax, Nova Scotia is a particularly stunning example of official erasure. Established after the War of 1812 by Black Loyalists, this black community suffered economic deprivation and substandard education throughout its existence; in 1964 the Halifax government used city dump trucks to relocate residents against their will in part to make way for a highway interchange. The painful loss of this historic community, now designated a national historic site, is the subject of George Boyd's play Consecrated Ground (1999).

26 See especially Collins, Patricia Hill, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, rev. 10th anniversary edn (New York: Routledge, 2000)Google Scholar.

27 Hine, Darlene Clark, ‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance’, in Ruiz, Vicki L. and DuBois, Ellen Carol, eds., Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 292–7, here p. 292Google Scholar.

28 Flynn, Karen, ‘Nurses in Resistance’, in Harding, Sophie A., ed., Surviving in the Hour of Darkness: The Health and Wellness of Women of Colour and Indigenous Women (Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2003), pp. 3–12Google Scholar.

29 Davis, ‘Healing in the Kitchen’, p. 280.

30 See, for example, two reflective pieces in ‘Healing Warrior Marks: Battling Stress’ and ‘Taking Care’ in Harding, ed., Surviving in the Hour of Darkness, pp. 125–9, 130–31. In the first selection author Crystal E. Wilkinson acknowledges her own SBW behaviour, while in the second she pays homage to her grandmother who always advised her to take care of herself even though the grandmother did otherwise, functioning as an SBW to family, domestic employers and, presumably, friends.

31 Karen Flynn and Audrey Taylor assert that comparatively more is known about black people's health in the United States and Britain than in Canada. Flynn, Karen and Taylor, Audrey, ‘“We Must Do Whatever It Takes”: Promoting and Sustaining Black Canadian Women's Health in Toronto’, in Kalipeni, Ezekiel, Flynn, Karen and Pope, Cynthia, eds., Strong Women, Dangerous Times: Gender and HIV/AIDS in Africa (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2009), pp. 253–70, here p. 254Google Scholar.

32 ‘What Do African American Women Suffer From?’, available at http://www.womancando.org/womancando/africanamerican.htm, accessed 8 June 2009.

33 Spillers, Hortense, ‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book’, in Mitchell, Angelyn, ed., Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 454–81, here p. 471Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 475, italics mine.

35 Bailey and Lewis, Sistahs, p. 319 (the ellipsis is in the original).

36 Ibid., p. 310.

37 Ibid., p. 315.

38 Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, p. 236.

39 Gopinath, Gayatri, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Publics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Dolan, Jill, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Madison, D. Soyini, Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics and Performance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005)Google Scholar.

41 Walcott, Rinaldo, Black Like Who?, 2nd edn (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003), p. 22Google Scholar.