Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Studies in the Making of Race andNation in Canada is an important contribution to the burgeoning field of critical Canadian Studies.Thobani develops an exciting theoretical framework for explicating the relationship between national and racial subject formation that productively builds on the works of Canadian scholars such as Himani Bannerji, Sherene Razack, and Eva Mackey.What Thobani calls the "exaltation process" (the process delineating the specific human characteristics said to distinguish the nation and its national subjects from others), stands out as an innovative theoretical contribution to the fields of critical nationalism, race, and postcolonial studies more broadly.Anyone conducting research or teaching in the fields of Canadian nationalism and the constitution of national subjects will find this book useful.Thobani's thorough introductory chapter lays out her theoretical project.She explains, in clear language, that her work uses Foucault's theorization of subject formation within modernity, premised on the dual process of subjection and subjectification.However, Thobani argues that Foucault's understanding of sovereignty in relation to subject formation, in such works as The History of Sexuality Vols.I and II, must be reworked in any analysis of colonial relations.Thobani's postcolonial theorization productively draws on the accounts of colonial violence of Achille Mbembe and Frantz Fanon.In Mbembe's work on sovereign power, what he calls "necro-politics" over colonized populations is enacted through the capacity to dictate "who may live and who must die" (p.12).Thobani argues persuasively that this conception problematizes Foucault's understanding of the selfconstituting practices of the subject, since different modalities of force relations than those present within the European imperial centre govern colonized populations."The colonial world," Thobani explains using Fanon's work on the colonial encounter, "emerged as a world divided: on the one side, a world of law, privilege, access to wealth, status, and power for the settler; on the other, a world defined in law as being 'law-
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".