From Seaton Village to Global Village: Metonymies of Exile and Globalization in Judith Thompson's Sled
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As in other settler/invader colonies that artificially invented and inserted themselves as nation-states in regions where they did not naturally belong, the collective feelings of estrangement and the reassessment of Canada’s history and national identity have been ongoing. Inspired by recent theories of globalization, this study proposes the understanding of Canadian colonialism as a form of macro-globalization, taking place during the second stage of historical globalization, and of official multiculturalism as a type of micro-globalization, which foreshadows the third and more intense wave of globalization that started in the second half of the twentieth century. This perspective dismantles the myth that Canada’s multi-national nature is determined by its so-called “exceptionalism,” which Irene Bloemraad explains as the result of the economic selection of immigrants, geographical location, and most of all the worldpraised tendency to welcome ethnically diverse immigrants because of its “immigration-as-nation-building paradigm” state policy (7). Using this theoretical frame, this essay argues that the metonymic depiction of 1990s Canada in Judith Thompson’s Sled asserts exile as a shared identity marker determined by globalization. The first part of this study analyzes how the combined legacies of colonialism and Pierre Trudeau’s multicultural policy generate the characters’ collective exile. The second part investigates some of Sled’s characters as metonymic representations of Canadians’ ethnic diversity and examples of exile determined by globalization on an individual level.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".