Revis(it)ing personal, theoretical and national histories: A critical review-essay of Encountering Modernity: Twentieth Century South African Cinemas with an interview with Keyan G. Tomaselli
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Keyan G. Tomaselli's book Encountering Modernity: Twentieth Century South African Cinemas (Rozenberg UNISA Press, 2006) is an effective and incisive summary of the various theories, ideas and analytical frames that have characterized how Tomaselli has continued to approach the study of South African cinemas throughout a period of 25 years. Not content to merely provide readers with a collection of previously published writings, Tomaselli has extensively revised and reworked the essays and book chapters contained in this collection as a means to (re)write South Africa into modernity and provide South African cinema with a history, resulting in a theoretical undertaking that is part intellectual autobiography and part critical attempt to frame South African cinemas in African historical, narrative and theoretical terms. It is indeed within these lines blurring the conceptual and epistemological tension between the concepts of historicity, modernity and autobiography if not subjectivity that we formulate our critical analysis of this review-essay. This review-essay includes two main sections. First, we critically look at the ways in which Tomaselli writes and rewrites theoretical articulation making possible his analyses of South African cinema. Second, we engage in a short dialogue with him, asking him to clarify some of the conceptual tensions we found in his book.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".