“The scuttlework of empire”: A Postcolonial Reading of Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IN A RESEARCH STUDY for the royal commission on Renewing and Strengthening Our Place in Canada, historian Jerry Bannister notes that Newfoundland is one of many “post-colonial societies ... confront[ing] the effects of imperialism” (Bannister 2003, 151). At the forefront of this confrontation, according to Bannister, is a “wave of new writing based on literary interpretations of the province’s past” (137). Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams figures prominently in the article, and Bannister claims that such examples of “historical impressionism” (139) have begun to play a major role in (re)defining Newfoundland’s culture and history. While the Newfoundland postcolonial condition needs to be considered, a postcolonial reading of Johnston’s novel best demonstrates how The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is essentially an investigation of Newfoundland identity which subverts and rejects various myths and tropes adopted by both islanders and outsiders. Jim Zucchero discusses the benefits of “postcolonial reading”: “Theories of hybridity and ambivalence emerging out of current postcolonial studies provide useful models and methods ... for rethinking Canadian narratives ... by reorientating us to ideas about diaspora, cultural identity and cultural belonging” (Zucchero 253). While Johnston’s novel deals only briefly with the “Newfoundland diaspora” (his protagonist at one point does leave the island to find work in New York), it does deal extensively with the notion of Newfoundlanders “leaving” their colony/nation and “arriving” in a strange new country. In the opening lines of the novel, Sheilagh Fielding states that “[t]he past is literally another country now,” and she again expresses the anxiety generated by the loss of “cultural identity and
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".