The Future of Racial Memory: Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Redress in Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Itsuka
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The majority of criticism surrounding Kogawa's Obasan and Itsuka assumes that reconciliation and resistance to racial injustice are incompatible, thereby overlooking Kogawa's complex exploration of the transformative potential forgiveness and reconciliation can provide Japanese Canadians in resisting and defusing the power of the oppressor. Forgiveness can only follow an apology that acknowledges wrongdoing; it does not merely reinscribe ideologically racist messages of power operating in Canadian society, nor invoke the model minority myth to avoid compensatory action. Such recognition of the past, however, is necessarily dependant on memory, which both texts represent as unstable and unreliable yet essential to the healing process. Kogawa contends with the tension between these postmodern and humanist concepts of memory through the issei word Itsuka, meaning someday, which captures the Japanese sense of the anteriority of the future. Forgiveness essentially constitutes a form of renarration that recollects the past while simultaneously opening up possibilities for a future.
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 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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".