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This essay demonstrates that Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness explore important tensions in the Elizabethan understanding of the lived experience of the damned. Calvinist theologians tended to describe reprobation in terms that unintentionally suggested direct divine agency and responsibility, despite their insistence that culpability for sin lies in human nature. Aligning closely with Calvinist visions of reprobation, the plays characterize their villains as feeling compulsions to sin so powerful that they are experienced as external impositions, even as these characters presume their own internal sinfulness. The agonizing inescapability of these characters' compulsions is emphasized through contrast with the ambiguous liberations of the plays' female protagonists. The plays highlight the contradiction in Calvinist descriptions of reprobation by generating dramatic effects that prompt audiences to suspect that what the tortured reprobates experience as divine interference is real rather than merely a projection of guilt. Despite their Calvinist elements, the plays reinforce the doubts raised by anti-Calvinists about English Calvinism's predestinarian theology.

This article presents a reading of Louis-Ferdinand Céline through the concept of trolling. A relatively new phenomenon, trolling denotes an attempt to elicit a negative response in a chosen target via deliberate provocation or incitement. While inextricable from the online social media platforms that have facilitated its emergence as a discursive mode, trolling is dependent on rhetorical strategies that are hardly new: irony, self-referentiality, effrontery, aggression, etc. Trolls seek to cultivate a brand around the antipathy they delight in triggering. I contend that Céline attempted to do just this in the postwar period, and more specifically in the series of interviews he conducted at Meudon in the last decade of his life. I thus argue against some recent scholarship that claims that Céline attempted to regain, by expressing contrition, a sympathetic audience following his condemnation for having published a series of egregiously antisemitic pamphlets. Rather, I suggest that he sought to instrumentalize his notoriety for his own advantage; some readers, he likely reasoned, are drawn to him because, not in spite of, his infamy. My argument draws on a body of recent writing on the relationship between humour, new media and far-right politics.

Due to the persistent and tenacious practices of anti-Black racism, embedded in White supremacist policing practices, Black and Indigenous people are overwhelmingly overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of Black people are killed at the hands of police in Toronto. The Canadian criminal justice system is complicit in perpetuating anti-Black racism through practices of surveillance, carding, and racial profiling. This paper contributes to the analysis of anti-Black racism in the Canadian criminal justice system, emphasizing the circumstances of Black people in Toronto. The goal is to wed the study of Black criminalization with the analysis of anti-Black racism and social stratification in Canada to show how existing patterns of racism and socioeconomic marginalization are reinforced by a White supremacist criminal justice system. The paper offers recommendations to address the issue of anti-Black racism, including the hiring of more Black people in the police force. Conceptually, the paper contributes to our understanding of how anti-Black racism ricochets to hurt us all in society.

Keywords: Anti-Black racism, Criminal Justice System, Black people, Racial Disparities, Toronto-Canada, White supremacy, racisme contre les Noirs, système de justice pénale, personnes noires, disparités raciales, Toronto-Canada, suprématie blanche

In this article, I examine how Sissieretta Jones (frequently described as America's first Black superstar, among other superlatives) strategically leveraged her European performance reviews in order to increase her listenership and wages in the United States. Jones toured Europe for the first (and only) time from February until November in 1895. According to clippings that she provided to African American newspapers, the singer performed at the renowned Winter Garden in Berlin for three months. Sissieretta Jones also claimed that she performed for Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, at his palace and was subsequently presented with an elaborate diamond brooch for her performance. Afterward, the singer told the African American newspaper the Indianapolis Freeman that she would like to live in Europe permanently. Her biographers frequently cite the success of this trip and its symbolic importance for African Americans. And yet, evidence of these events in the archives of major German newspapers is elusive and contradictory at best, if it exists at all. Nevertheless, after the much-hyped tour, her career would take many twists and turns. Sissieretta Jones eventually performed in venues like Carnegie Hall and Madison Square Garden. She was the highest-paid Black female performer of the nineteenth century and a role model for future generations of Black performers.

This article examines Evangeline as an identity myth, which during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributed in promoting a feeling of unity among members of the Acadian people. After a brief examination of the four stages of myth — spring, summer, autumn and winter — the reader is plunged into the four levels of myth — geographical, economical, sociological and cosmological. The study of the four levels shows how the use of reality in the myth's description acts as a bridgehead between present and past. Finally the exploration of the changes in vitality of the Evangeline myth begins with the primary phase or creation of the story. It then looks at the implicit phase or acceptance of the tale by a wide audience. Lastly, it considers the present rationalized questioning phase. Examination of these three phases of vitality allow the reader to comprehend how perceptions and the use of Evangeline have changed since her first creation up until the present day. The conclusion suggests that if myth is a way of finding meaningful existence, as well as emotion translated into image in order to promote a sense of group identity, then Evangeline appears to fulfill this function.