Inside and Outside the Hyena’s Belly: Nega Mezlekia and the Politics of Time and Authorship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After first-time author Nega Mezlekia won the Governor General’s Award for non-fiction with his memoir Notes from the Hyena’s Belly: Memories of My Ethiopian Childhood, Anne Stone, an established Canadian writer, came out in the media with the claim that she had written all but 20 pages of the draft that went to Mezlekia’s publisher. This essay examines the authorship controversy that followed these allegations by teasing out the politics of time and authorship that underlie the controversy and textual level of Mezlekia’s memoir. It shows that the textual and extratextual dimensions of the memoir are loci of isochronic and allochronic forces that co-exist and clash on highly uneven terms in the contact zones of authorship, narrative form, textual narrative, and copyright. While this essay focusses on a specific case, its objective transcends this specificity in that it explores the positive potential of allochronic time as a force that complicates the modern legal and cultural notions of the imprinted author, of the space- and time-independent nature of print, and of an isochronic world in which everything happens at the same universal intervals of time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".