Freedom Through Contamination: Collapsed Boundaries in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent scholarship, much attention has been paid to what seems to be a new direction for the African American literary tradition(s). Many contemporary authors (Octavia Butler, Ernest Gaines, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Ishmael Reed, and Sherley Anne Williams, to name but a few)—amongst whom Charles Johnson is often included—re-create in their fiction the conditions of slavery and of the Middle Passage. They do so, according to Timothy L. Parish, “in order to connect the receding past to the living present,” a process through which African Americans “begin to understand [themselves] and American and African American culture in general” (Rampersad qtd. in Parish 81). The African American writers who participate in this rewriting of history are “resisting the ‘master’s’ versions of historical experience” (Robbins 531). Yet I am reluctant to agree with the contention that Charles Johnson is one of these contemporary authors. Johnson, I would argue, is not only revising the master’s version of history; he is also resisting the (ex-)slave’s revision of the master’s historical construction. His appropriation of the form of the slave narrative for the novels Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage critiques white historiography of slavery, as well as black literary traditions.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".