Performing West Indian Childhood across Oceans and Time: Gender and Identity in Marlene Nourbese Phillip’s Harriet’s Daughter , Merle Hodge’s For the Life of Laetitia , and Cyril Dabydeen’s Sometimes Hard
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In lieu of an abstract, here is an excerpt from the article: In this paper, I discuss both the established roles which circumscribe the characters in the novels because of their places within their societies and cultures, and just as important, the ways in which the characters respond to those roles by resisting, adapting, and varying them. In other words, I argue that the fluid spaces of adolescence, time, and transnational movement combine in the young adult novels examined to present characters with the challenges of trying out and reconstituting evolving West Indian identities. The process of reconstitution requires them to negotiate generational perspectives, and make quick shifts between old and new cultural patterns. The characters achieve these quick role changes through instruments such as dream, impersonation, and the adoption of the role of satirist, calypsonian, and class clown. When their acts fail, they seek physical escape or suffer psychological breakdown. The characters’ performances of reconstituted identities are examined first against a background discussion of the performative in West Indian and Black-diasporic-postcolonial discourse, and subsequently, under four headings: (1 negotiating modernity, (2) negotiating the body as transmigratory space, (3) negotiating totems of West Indian culture, and (4) negotiating the Creole and other empowering speech acts. The paper concludes with a brief comment on ideological issues surrounding writing West Indian childhood into the twenty-first century.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".