"A Shared Burden": Reading Chaos and/as Utopia in Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In hir work on wildness, Jack Halberstam argues that epistemological chaos (or “wildness”) functions as an “alternative to political discourse, to identity politics, [...] to how we want to think about being -- together and apart” (127). Similarly, in Cruising Utopia , Jose Munoz conceives of “being together” in political struggle as a utopian practice wherein differences in identity coexist with “a belonging in collectivity” (20). Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this paper aims to bring these crucial developments in queer theory into readings of the colonial encounter within a specifically South Asian context. Focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 novel Sea of Poppies , I argue that the ship central to Ghosh’s novel is a site of wildness that collapses the racial, gendered, and class boundaries pivotal to the maintenance of colonial order. In this wild space, the traumatic and violent experiences of individual passengers -- otherwise incommunicable and untranslatable between categories of identity and difference -- become the “shared burden” of all (Ghosh 299). In rendering this profound intimacy among the passengers possible, Ghosh evinces the utopian potential for collectivity that exists both within the specific context of the novel and, more broadly, in our contemporary struggle against colonial order.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| 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".