A Leisure Space, Revisited: Resolving the “Problem” of the Mixed-Race Child in Colin MacInnes's City of Spades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
British postwar leisure spaces such as the “Cosmopolitan” club in Colin MacInnes’s City of Spades served as sites for “immoral behaviour” such as drug use and sexual encounters that transgressed racial divides. According to Mica Nava, the interracial relationships fostered in these spaces were signifiers of a racially progressive modernity, but the perspective offered in City of Spades is more critical. In the novel, these subcultural leisure spaces are re-inhabited by two mixed-race children—the permanent markers of many of these otherwise fleeting interracial couplings. I approach City of Spades through theoretical frameworks of the leisure space and postcolonial interactions in Britain, in an effort to highlight how miscegenation in postwar Britain is criminalized through the bodies it produces. I argue that by giving stage to British subculture, City of Spades complicates dominant readings of racial acceptance, progressive modernity, and successful integration of mixed-race children into postwar British society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".