“I’se in Town, Honey”: Reading Aunt Jemima Advertising in Canadian Print Media, 1919 to 1962
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Between 1919 and 1962, the Aunt Jemima advertising trademark made frequent appearances in Canadian print media. While scholars have documented how the image of the faithful, happy-to-please Black slave woman captivated the American cultural imagination, the advertising trademark has received much less scholarly attention in Canada. As Canadian culture modernized in the 1920s, withstood a Depression and the Second World War, and witnessed the birth of the suburbs, Aunt Jemima advertisements reflected the changing milieu. Using textual and visual analysis, this essay argues that English-language media, primarily the Toronto Daily Star and Chatelaine magazine, publications which had the highest circulations in early twentieth-century Canada, were significant outlets for White middle-class Canadians. The presence of Aunt Jemima, a prototypical “Mammy” plucked from the plantation South, thus stands as an example of how race, class, and gender were constructed in English-language media, and by extension, dominant Canadian society in the first half of the twentieth century.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".