The Paradox of Return: Origins, Home and Identity in M.G. Vassanji's The Gunny Sack
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper seeks to explore how M.G. Vassanji conciliates between the nostalgic desire for home and community through the characters in The Gunny Sack on the one hand, and the inescapable consciousness of the reality of exile and the absence of community on the other hand on the basis of the idea of a multi-locational home. Reconfigured as the Shehrazade of the Arabian Nights, the novel's central trope, the gunny sack, curiously parallels Vassanji's own story of a non-descript migrant writer in an alien land, who struggled for identity and cultural survival through spinning an endless yarn of stories of migration. Although, indeed, diasporic migration is a one-way affair, Vassanji nevertheless strikes discursive postures of a return to an imagined originary home, while paradoxically critiquing at the same time the notions of originary home and identity.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| 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".