A “Just Hearing”: Reading Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts as Counter to State Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The immigration form that refugees are expected to complete within fifteen days of arriving on Canadian soil requests that refugees provide a personal narrative history. This request appears to extend an articulation of selfhood, and welcome the refugee into the fold of humanity. However, the reality is that these forms serve the self-endorsing practices of the state in its maintenance of sovereignty both juridically, in the ordering of the narrative process, and culturally, through the reification of the European, Christian traditions of the settler cultures of Canada, thereby reinstating the refugee as a minoritized subject. This essay examines the narrative demands made by the Personal Information Form (PIF) on Tamil refugees who arrived in Canada at the height of the civil conflict, and turns to a reading of Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts to explore ways in which the novel may serve as a critical intervention in the refugee hearing process, allowing the refugee to document and make truth claims in her own history of trauma, giving her experience more complex meaning. Building upon Paul Gready’s claim that the “unique truth practices and repertoire available to the novel as a genre” allow readers to explore “uncomfortable truths” in matters pertaining to human rights conflicts, this essay argues that in some instances the novel provides a more “just hearing” for the refugee.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".