A London Legacy of Ira Aldridge: Henry Francis Downing and the Paratheatrical Poetics of Plot and Cast(e)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: Situating Henry Francis Downing as an important if traditionally overlooked black playwright of America, Britain, and the Atlantic world, this article brings focus to Downing’s 1914 drama Incentives, which evinces Downing’s indebtedness to nineteenthcentury black dramatist Ira Aldridge even as it conceives of the world (during the months immediately preceding the First World War) as interconnected by sinews of capital, empire, and transnational alliance. As Incentives weaves its settings, back-stories, and spheres of concern through Britain, the American West, New York City, continental Europe, and European empires throughout the world, the drama’s preoccupations with the theatrical conventions of plot and cast contribute to Downing’s larger legacy as a playwright attempting to use drama to alter representations of diasporic blackness within a version of the world that envisions transnational capitalism as usurping the hegemony of nation-states. Downing’s current status as a little-known playwright should cause critical reflection on the ways in which scholars have pursued questions of diaspora and 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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".