The Correspondence of Bernard O' Dowd and Walt Whitman: Indigeneity and the Cosmopolitics of Settler Literary Nationalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last two years before his death, Walt Whitman corresponded regularly with an Australian poet named Bernard O'Dowd. While he would later reach great prominence O'Dowd was, at this time, an obscure antipodean nobody, a poetic dilettante whose voice was yet to emerge. On 15 March 1891, Whitman wrote to his admiring antipodean correspondent noting that "[t]houghtful folks here are paying much attention to you south there & Canada north" (Whitman, Collected Writings 5:176). Despite this gesture of transnational comparison between the two countries, Whitman makes no apparent connection between the indigenous peoples of either dominion, nor does he invoke the indigenous peoples of North America. This omission of indigenous Australians is a perplexing lacuna given his deep concern with Native Americans, for instance in the references to "Red Aborigines" in Starting from Paumanok, or to the "Squaw, wrapt in her yellow hemm' d cloth" passing among the multitudes of Song of Myself, or indeed to the "Austral Negro" highlighted in my epigraph (Leaves 30-1, 52). Whitman's association of Canada and Australia seems to be largely predicated on the connection of either to the United Kingdom. "The advice" of American writers on the two imperially governed nation states "is not to be in too g't a hurry to cut loose from G't Britain-but you both are the best judges and deciders of that" (Whitman, Collected Writings 5: 176). Despite this lacuna, there is a great deal to warrant the comparison between Whitman's attitude to the place of indigenous peoples in his vision of nation and a comparable articulation in O'Dowd's work. Each shares an insistence on nativist appropriations of indigeneity as the grounding of an embrace of difference that is nonetheless refused to the living indigenous subject.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".