Métissages: Williams Sassine's Saint Monsieur Baly, Wirriyamu , and Mémoire d'une peau
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of métissage has appeared in numerous discourses throughout history to refer to cultural encounters and the mixing of races. Thus, Gloria Onyeoziri notes, métissage is 'a term which [...] still carries significant traces of historical practices of oppression, psychological disturbances, sexual exploitation and struggles for the survival of cultural identities." In colonial Africa, mixed race individuals problematised the relationship between Self and Other, and the figure of the métis became inextricably intertwined with colonial histories of domination and exclusion. However, in the postcolonial era, the objectified figure of the métis emerged as a liberated and free speaking subject, and new models of métissage became available. Métissage materialised as a site of purposeful ambiguity, leading Françoise Lionnet to define it as "the site of undecidability and indeterminacy," a position "from which to challenge hegemonic languages." This article focuses on three novels by Francophone Guinean writer Williams Sassine: Saint Monsieur Baly (1973), Wirriyamu (1976) and Mémoire d'une peau (1998). The study examines the ways in which Sassine explores different manifestations of métissage in his fictional work to highlight the tensions and paradoxes underlying postcolonial identity in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".