Towards Socialism with a Small 's:' Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen and the Reconsideration of Welfare State Nostalgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article complicates recent calls for a return of the welfare state by historicizing its deleterious effects on racialized subjects in Britain through an analysis of Buchi Emecheta’s 1974 novel, Second-Class Citizen. The article examines the notion that the human costs of reviving state-centric policies aimed at countering the current hegemony of neoliberalism are worth the price, as exemplified by Tony Judt’s late-career call for a return of the welfare state. In accordance with Jennifer Wenzel’s concept of “anti-imperialist nostalgia,” I read Emecheta's text as militating against a simplistic left liberal nostalgia for the welfare state, seeking both political possibility in this past political formation while remaining vigilantly critical of its excesses. Just as Emecheta advocated a nuanced feminism that responds to material exigencies, rather than adhering rigidly to Eurocentric ideals, so this re-reading of her novel demonstrates the risks of an overly doctrinaire re-implementation of social democratic ideas.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".