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Just after World War II, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation hired the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Caresser to host a weekly program airing on its nationwide network and its fledgling International Service. His engagement, this essay argues, had less to do with "carry[ing] calypso to the world" (as a CBC press release put it) than with projecting to the world a particular image of Canada—as a modern, diverse, racially tolerant nation. That project was compromised, however, by Canada's fraught history with the West Indies. Reading Caresser's CBC career in the context of proposals for Canadian–West Indies "union" and the infamous West Indian Domestic Scheme of the 1950s, Eldridge uncovers some of the more obscure origins of Canada's imperfect multiculturalism.

Adjectival and Generic Pragmatism: Problems and Possibilities
While honoring the suggestion that one should always use an adjective with "pragmatism," I explore the possibility of a generic use of the term, contending that an orientation to habit or revisable practice is a useful indicator.

Early last November, Minneapolis, where I live, concluded a mayoral campaign in which race, masquerading as "crime" (surprise!), figured as the single most important issue. Although FBI statistics showed that violent crime had actually decreased over the last several years, there had been enough sensational anecdotal evidence to the contrary to keep the Minneapolitan unconscious haunted by the bogeyman who has arisen to account for the city's perceived decline. This spook (I use the word advisedly) figures centrally in a myth not so much of Paradise Lost as Paradise Spoiled: 10, 15 years ago, the story goes, this was a prosperous, clean, safe city, full of hardworking, tolerant, and liberal citizens. And then, they arrived, and kept on coming: aliens from Chicago, St. Louis, and (sotto voce) Gary—gangsters, criminals, and promiscuous welfare cheats bent on swindling their generous and gullible hosts out of hard-earned tax dollars ("'Moneyapolis,' they call us") and generally disrupting their peaceful way of life. Now it's getting to the point where it's almost as bad as New York.