Autobiography of the Other: David Dabydeen and the Imagination of Slavery
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autobiography is an important undercurrent of postcolonial literature, which offers a new tradition that deviates from the orthodoxy of western autobiography. David Dabydeen (1955- ), the Guyanese-British poet, novelist, and scholar of literature and art, has also been working on this new stream of autobiography. This paper focuses on Dabydeen's Hogarth's Blacks (1985) and A Harlot's Progress (1999). The former is a critical work in which Dabydeen celebrates Hogarth by asserting that Hogarth successfully represented the class solidarity between black slaves and underclass whites. And yet, the novel A Harlot's Progress, based on Hogarth's serial of prints of the same title, illustrates how solidarity among the oppressed – for example, that between the white prostitute (Moll) and the black servant in the second plate of Hogarth's serial – turns out to be impossible. A Harlot's Progress is a fictional slave narrative which offers a new model for postcolonial autobiography, which this paper proposes to term the of the other. It means to write an I narrative that is not my own – an impossible project as logically no one can author an autobiography of someone else. It is a project divided between the demand for the utopian self liberated from any social binding, and the latent and persistent desire for the community where the self should return and belong. In this light, the project does not only analyze slavery of the past, but it gives a most serious critique of the atomization of contemporary British society.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".