Bibliographic record
Abstract
They called me “the angriest Negro in America.” I wouldn’t deny that charge. I spoke exactly as I felt. I believe in anger. […] I’m not for wanton violence, I’m for justice. –Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm XDeconstruction keeps open the “beyond” of currently unimaginable transformative possibilities precisely in the name of Justice. –Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the LimitPublished in 1977, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon remains haunted by the debates and struggles of the previous two decades. Her characters seem to represent or embody different positions from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, conjuring in both oblique and explicit ways the words of its prominent spokesmen: W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Malcolm X. While the novel is often read as an account of the trauma wrought by racial injustice, it is, at the same time, an attempt to express an idea of justice loyal to this experience.1 This paper focuses on the figures of Guitar and Pilate, contending that each articulates and develops a concept of justice in Song of Solomon, and that each informs – or exerts pressure on – the other’s configuration of justice. Although the text does not ultimately sustain Guitar’s eye-for-an-eye directive, as the scholarship on the novel concurs, neither does it entirely dismiss or discredit it. Guitar has his say in two separate, lengthy dialogues; he also speaks on behalf of consequence in the enaction of justice: “’The earth is soggy with black people’s blood,’” he says about his involvement in the deadly Seven Days. “’And before us Indian blood. [ … ] I had to do something’” (Song 154). Pilate, I will argue, gestures toward a promise of justice, an ever-arriving ideal outside or beyond the necessity of force or retribution. In Morrison’s words: “She is something we wish existed on a wider scale” (Conversations 140). If Pilate stands for an ethical ideal, with an attendant ontological reconfiguration, Guitar stands for the reality of its absence in African American lives, announcing the force of law that often accompanies an ethical portal in an unjust world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".