Nancy Prince's Utopias: Reimagining the African American Utopian Tradition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT In A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1850), Nancy Gardner Prince travels from the northern United States to Russia and Jamaica and, in each location, struggles to create a “home” for herself and others through negotiation with (and resistance to) extant discourses of race, class, gender, and empire. Her utopias, like all real-world utopias, are doomed to fail, yet I argue that placing Prince's Narrative within the context of an expanded definition of utopian discourse reveals African American engagement in utopian thought at a much earlier period than supposed. As early as the 1820s, thousands of African Americans were attempting to create egalitarian societies in Canada and the margins of the northern United States, and these experiments had a dramatic impact on the literature of the period. I place all of Prince's utopias within the larger historical and literary context of the utopian fervor taking place throughout her lifetime. In so doing, I hope to expand the current conception of African American utopian literary production to include earlier, autobiographical writers such as Prince who sought out a “good place” significantly prior to the emergence of the African American utopian novel in the latter nineteenth century.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".