India via Trinidad and Canada: Negotiating Hospitality in Shani Mootoo’s Short Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Out on Main Street” and “The Upside-downness of the World as it Unfolds,” two stories from Shani Mootoo’s 1993 collection, explore how Canada functions as an interface between the Indian diaspora and its originary cultures. The stories play on dominant impulses to assign ethnic belonging based on skin colour, and Jacques Derrida’s reading of the contradictions inherent in (conditional) hospitality can help us tease out the implications of welcome offered to, and perceived by, Mootoo’s misread and racialized Indo-Trinidadian narrators. These stories illuminate how “India” travels from one diaspora (Trinidad) to another (Canada) and how face-to-face urban encounters enable the consolidation of “Indianness” in Canada. More specifically, they shed light on the processes through which diasporic Indians and white Canadians reproduce norms of Indianness and how these norms erase histories and distinctions within the broader Indian diaspora. Ultimately, Mootoo counters the way skin colour is “read” in Vancouver, and the asymmetries of intercultural encounter in these stories stress the need for a historicized and contextualized understanding of the multiplicity of Indian diasporas in Canada.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".