Affect and Diaspora: Unfashionable Hope in Melvin B. Tolson's <em>Libretto for the Republic of Liberia</em>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reads Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia as a poem undergirded by a transnational and multi-ethnic politics of identification. Previous scholars of Tolson’s work have argued that his poetry expands and redefines the possibilities inherent in modernist poetics. Building on these claims, I point to a specific and heretofore unremarked strategy through which he accomplishes this goal: namely, a bold affective optimism that both presages Afro-futurism and counters political ideologies founded on racial difference. Tolson’s Marxist-democratic vision of a future utopian society centered in Africa but extending throughout the world is rooted in his belief in the possibility of affective connection between individuals otherwise divided by class, race, or language. In its subversion and revision of received cultural categories, such a connection also constitutes a response to engrained forms of racial melancholia. While refusing to overlook systemic and historical injustice, Tolson’s Libretto, thus, offers a window into a politics of optimism that restores a sense of social hope to discussions in recent and contemporary affect theory.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".