The Resilient Opacity of Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Vassanji’s novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall recounts the life of its eponymous hero, and through him highlights the difficulties encountered by the South Asian community in Kenya, from the years leading up to independence to post-independence years. Part neither of the grand narrative of colonisation nor of the anti-colonial struggle, the Lalls are doomed to a de facto in-betweeness which the protagonist finds alienating. This novel is characterized by a constant shift from past to present, from the childhood years which the homodiegetic narrator remembers with a certain nostalgia to his perspective as a fully-grown up man who now lives in Canada. Yet the shift in perspective does not imply a move from innocence to experience, let alone a move from ignorance to knowledge. A strategy of partial unveiling underpins the novel on a structural, generic and metatextual level, thereby generating a certain opacity. The purpose of this partial unveiling is to bring to our notice the instrumentalisation of the South Asian community, doubly subaltern.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".