Dionne Brand's Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rosi Braidotti suggests that ‘The human has been subsumed in global relations of intimacy, complicity and proximity with forces of the inhuman and post-human kind: scientific, industrial and military complexes, global communication networks, processes of commodification and exchange on a global scale.’ She argues further that it is the task of critical theory to track the ‘fluctuations’ of this new disorder (264). In this paper, I ask what tracking these fluctuations ‘in global relations of intimacy, complicity and proximity’ involves for the poet Dionne Brand, who sets herself this task in her long poem, Inventory, and for the critic who reads her work fully attentive to the historical legacies of humanism and their entanglements with the humanities and the humanitarian. 1 Beyond merely tracking such changes, however, I subscribe to Simon Gikandi’s belief that ‘the role of the critic,’ at least in part, ‘is to make literature the medium of problematization.’ Literature itself, he suggests, ‘problematizes experiences which might appear to us to be easily accessible and consumable’ (4). But, as he goes on to observe, these attempts at problematizing literature risk co-option when translated into the institutional contexts provided by disciplines, the media, and the university. The call for papers for this special issue asked two related questions that I want to pursue here: ‘What good is the study of literature?’ and ‘How does the turn to ethics position literary criticism in relation to politics?’ While it is not possible to answer these questions definitively, I follow Brand’s lead into registering the visceral force of the kinds of global intimacies enumerated by Braidotti to ask what these practices imply for the political projects of citizenship and community in contemporary times. I argue that to fully grasp the implications of how Brand’s poetry engages and is engaged in these emerging global complicities, critics need to attend to the experiential dimensions of its affect as well as its explicit meaning. 2
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it