The Jahaji-Bhain Principle: A Critical Survey of the Indo-Caribbean Women’s Novel, 1990-2009
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides the first critical survey of the Indo-Caribbean women’s novel, a distinct sub-genre which now spans approximately two decades. The survey examines the way these novels critically map the trajectory of Indo-Caribbean women’s lives from the moment of colonial servitude to the post-colonial present, through highly individuated expressions of Indian female subjectivity, in a context where sexual and racial politics have so often overdetermined women’s lives. It anchors its discussion of these novels in the feminist poetics of the “ jahaji-bhain principle of affiliation”, which advocates a more fluid and racially inclusive application of the ethics of community epitomized by jahaji-hood, a traditionally male-dominant and ethnocentric system of inter-relation borne out of the history of indentureship. Writers discussed include those who have published several or more works in the genre — namely Lakshmi Persaud, Jan Shinebourne, Shani Mootoo and Oonya Kempadoo — as well as first-time novelists Ramabai Espinet, Joy Mahabir, Niala Maharaj, Narmala Shewcharan, Ryhaan Shah and Andrea Gunraj.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".