Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the representation of resistance in two recent novels, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage, in order to draw out some of the challenges that these novels pose to current trends in postcolonial studies. Although both are novels of nations in crisis, and are shaped by the dialectic of repression and resistance, the former has achieved considerable popularity, while the latter remains relatively unknown. I try to account for this discrepancy by studying their respective representations of subaltern agency. I suggest that both novels challenge received postcolonial conceptions of marginality and subalternity. My reading of Mistry's realist novel shows that the search for an authentic subaltern voice, which postcolonial theorists have often cautioned against, is fraught with contradictions. However, Mistry's realist representation of the poor and the oppressed does not erase subaltern agency as much as it reduces it to the level of a micro-politics that sits easily with much of postcolonial theory. On the other hand, Mo's novel seems at first sight to bear all the trappings of postcolonialist discourse, with its use of a multiply-determined narrator whose chief characteristic is his marginality. Nevertheless, I argue that the novel resists incorporation into a postcolonial problematic because of its affirmative vision of national liberation.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".