Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism, and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed's <i>Flight to Canada</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conjuring the Mysteries of Slavery: Voodoo, Fetishism, and Stereotype in Ishmael Reed's Flight to CanadaIn a vibrant proliferation since the mid-1960s, fictional texts have grappled with the characteristic omissions, gaps, and distortions in the record of New World slavery. 1 Often referred to as neo-slave narratives, some of these texts assume polemical or revisionist approaches in order to correct the historical record, while others focus on the obscure and unarticulated facets of slavery in an imaginative recuperation of the past. 2 In Flight to Canada (1976), Ishmael Reed adopts both strategies.But he also explores the legacy of slavery in the present; to this end, he proposes an alternative lexicon for historical reconstruction.3 Drawing on the social, political, and artistic practices of Voodoo, Reed transfigures nontextual forms of remembrance from the cultural legacy of the African diaspora to extend the limits of the discourse on slavery.His aesthetic in Flight to Canada also incorporates aspects of postmodernism to show the connections between chattel slavery's reification of people and bodies and the fetishistic notions of race and sexuality it has produced.Reed draws from Voodoo-specifically from its New World version, also known as hoodoo or conjure-because, as a cultural practice transported by enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage, Voodoo maintains an unwritten record of slavery and the diaspora.Etymologically in the language of the African Fons, Voodoo means introspection (vo) into the unknown (dou or du); culturally, it is a form of ancestor worship in which the souls of the dead-known as loa or mystères-are evoked and made manifest through ritual.4 In the New World, especially in Haiti, Voodoo rituals recall and restage the history of cultural dislocation and enslavement.Reed recognizes that Voodoo has
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".