"The Place She Miss": Exile, Memory, and Resistance in Dionne Brand's Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Black lesbian feminist from Trinidad, transplanted at the age of seventeen to Toronto, Dionne Brand embodies and reenacts in her fiction, poetry, and essays the experiences of the African diaspora, centered in the Atlantic. Brand writes of the diaspora as displacement, loss, exile, yet she incorporates into her fiction the power of memory and the urgency of resistance, especially through the mapping of space to locate diaspora identifications. Struggling with the consequences of a colonized past in the Caribbean as well as with the contemporary realities of global economies, Brand's female characters express a repeated need to leave the place they occupy--where their bodies may resemble occupied territory--and to find a space of empowerment. While the stories in the collection Sans Souci contain anger, rage, and dreams of retribution in response to the violence against Black women perpetrated by powers colonial and neo-colonial alike, Brand's second novel, At the Full and Change of the Moon, is more elegiac in tone, a narrative permeated by the longing expressed by one character for a line of descent that might rival or replace the signature line of imperialism and enslavement. The reclaiming of oceanic spaces offers a complex site of memory--border space, liminal space, home space--a re-visioning of the Black Atlantic.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".