Realizing the flexible imaginary : Canadian identity in contemporary theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" and Michael Billig's "Banal Nationalism", this paper searches for Canadian identity in five contemporary Canadian plays. The plays are from writers of different ages, genders, ethnicities and parts of Canada, and span approximately 25 years. The dramatic texts include David French's "Jitters", Kelly Rebar's "Bordertown Café", Joan MacLeod's "Amigo's Blue Guitar", Djanet Sears' "Harlem Duet" and Camyar Chai, Guillermo Verdecchia and Marcus Youssef's "The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil". The paper determines, after much exploration of the plays' characters and their actions, that flexibility is the notion reinforced as the Canadian ideal. The multicultural, liberal, egalitarian nation of Canada imagines itself as able to shift or change whenever necessary. With respect to individual identities, group dynamics and inhabited spaces, this flexibility is requisite for Canadian citizens. The mimetic nature of theatre suggests it maintains an important role in the continual quest to discern the Canadian identity. In mirroring society, the theatre offers a clear indication of the perspectives which dominate the imaginations of Canadian playwrights and, therefore, their plays. The theatre and society will continue to reflect one another; in Canada, they will do so with flexibility.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.052 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".