Where Literature Fills the Gaps: The Book of Negroes as a Canadian Work of Rememory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With The Book of Negroes , Lawrence Hill obliges his audience to remember – or discover – that slavery is part of the Canadian collective story. George Elliott Clarke argues that because African-Canadian history is ignored in Canada, African-Canadian writers act as historians to address gaps in the historical record. By addressing a number of such gaps, including the Canadian history of slavery, the slave experience generally, and the female slave experience in particular, Hill, like Toni Morrison, explores how fiction can be a source of truth. Through the voice of Aminata Diallo, the history of slavery is rememoried and rewoven into the fabric of the Canadian historical record, and Hill’s novel is thus part of a larger tradition that includes Afua Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal . Hill uses a number of discursive strategies to invest his protagonist with agency, and the story of Aminata addresses some of the strategic silences that were characteristic of the traditional slave narrative genre. With this novel, then, Hill undermines Canadian exceptionalism when it comes to slavery and asserts Canada’s position in the historical and cultural space of what Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".