“Since when has paper any value?”: Reading, materiality, and meaning in M.G. Vassanji’s fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last fifteen years scholarship on postcolonial literatures has increasingly turned to readers as the focus of empirical study. While such research has helped make visible the agency of postcolonial readers in global literary exchanges, it has tended to overlook the many ways in which postcolonial subjects’ encounters with texts can exceed or circumvent literal reading. The Asian-African-Canadian novelist M.G. Vassanji has been particularly attuned to the physicality of paper, most definitively in two of his novels set in East Africa, The Gunny Sack (1989) and The Book of Secrets (1994). In this article I analyse how Vassanji’s characters, both literate and illiterate, engage paper’s physical properties to ground their everyday practices of memory, valuation, and interpretation. By attending to paper’s materiality in Vassanji’s work postcolonial studies can situate its own reading practices in the context of material ways of doing things with texts.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".