Politicizing Difference: Performing (Post)Colonial Historiography in Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France and Sinking Neptune
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Four hundred years after Marc Lescarbot’s performance of Le Theâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France — the first documented play in Canada — Montreal’s Optative Theatrical Laboratories mounted a revisionist re-enactment, Sinking Neptune. Lescarbot’s play adapted the European oceanic masque and French reception to welcome the returning French colonial leader, to naturalize the imperial project, and to instruct its Indigenous Mi’kmaq viewers on how to act like dutiful “sauvages.” Sinking Neptune, in turn, critiques Lescarbot’s play as a colonialist “derogatory spectacle” and frames the play as an imperialist fantasy of intercultural harmony, challenging its cultural implications as a Canadian first. Through its collective creation process, multiple sources, divergent perspectives, shifts in historical context, and interactive performance, Sinking Neptune exemplifies postcolonial revisionist historiography. The play demonstrates that revisionist drama involves both a representation and a deconstruction of imperial values, rhetoric, and strategies to enact repetition with political difference.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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".