Beyond the Cape: Amitav Ghosh, Frederick Douglass and the Limits of the Black Atlantic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical formations of the Black Atlantic, beginning with Paul Gilroy and continued by Joseph Roach among others, have posited the Atlantic rim as a stage for vernacular performance and circulation that transcends the borders of racist nation-state. Gilroy begins The Black Atlantic (1992) with the image of a ship at sea as the central ordering principle and symbol for transatlantic cultural exchange. It is this same chronotope of the ship and its associations with the middle passage that begins Indian writer Amitav Ghosh’s recent novel Sea of Poppies (2008). Set primarily in the Indian Ocean on the eve of the Opium Wars, the narrative of Ghosh’s historical novel begins with the Indian villager Deeti’s mystical vision of the former slave ship Ibis as it arrives in Calcutta from Baltimore to take on a cargo of indentured (coolie) labor to replace the recently emancipated slaves of the British colonies. This paper argues that this (re)vision of Gilroy’s central trope in the Indian Ocean signals a restaging of western hemispheric theories of diaspora and the oceanic beyond the heuristic borders of transatlantic paradigms articulated by Gilroy and Joseph Roach. To the Atlantic genealogies of Ghosh’s Ibis and its African-American first mate Zachary Reid—who becomes both witness and participant in the formation of the 19th century Indian diaspora—the novel adds the non-western third destination, Calcutta, into the circulation of vernacular performance, positing a globalized oceanic model that bridges Atlanticist and Postcolonial discourses of hybridity.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".