Liberal Multiculturalism and the Limits of Recognition in Caryl Phillips's The Nature of Blood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, critics of Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997) seem to have developed a consensus that the novel presents a cosmopolitan view of diasporic identity. While I agree with these critics, I believe that their “cosmopolitan theses” have yet to articulate why Phillips chooses to present a cosmopolitan view of diasporic identity. To this end, I shall argue that, in The Nature of Blood, Phillips’s cosmopolitanism emerges as a conscious response to the failure of multiculturalism to recognize what Robin Cohen (2008) calls “victim diasporas” in liberal states. Phillips suggests that, for diasporic groups who have suffered a history of collective trauma, a cosmopolitan view of cultural identity, which draws upon histories of shared experiences and morality across cultures, is far more tenable than an essentialist view of cultural identity.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".