The sovereignty of the imagination: Poetic authority and the fiction of North Atlantic universals in Dionne Brand’s <i>Chronicles of the Hostile Sun</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her 1984 poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand examines the radicalism of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) vis-a-vis mainstream North American politics, which were decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. Brand uses poetry to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the postindependence Caribbean. This article argues that Brand’s poetry unsettles “facts” about the revolution’s history by discrediting American imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct, I examine Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Grenada Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. Brand writes the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals it as a collective project of Caribbean people whose goals and values have points of similarity as well as points of difference from those in the Global North. My analysis explores the way in which Brand sets up literary texts, and poetry in particular, as an alternative form of historical narrative in response to US-centered North Atlantic universals.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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