Rough Play: Reading Black Masculinity in Austin Clarke’s “Sometimes, a Motherless Child”and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Austin Clarke’s short story “Sometimes, a Motherless Child” and Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For are narratives about blackness and masculinity; they offer literary-historical documents that comment on a cultural moment in a cultural system that frames black men within hateful cultural projections. The main characters in each story refuse to be pigeonholed into conventionally racialized black macho identities; Oku and BJ embrace radical discontinuities within performances of black masculinity and change masculine codes in order to survive. Such performances rupture the overdeveloped images of black men as aggressive, hyper-sexualized “thugs” or “hoodlums” by exposing the faulty assumptions within those images. Rather than abiding by the monadic conceptions of black patriarchy or of black solidarity, Brand and Clarke retexture depictions of black men to offer multi-textual black subjects who enact varieties of black masculinity.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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".