Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alexandra Watkins, Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora (Brill/Rodopi, 2015)The Sri Lankan diaspora has endured linguistic politics, internal insurgencies and the Civil War, generating creative responses by writers, painters, filmmakers and artists. Identity formation problems are often central to their work, which obseves the challenges of ethnicity, exodus and displacement for Sri Lankans within Sri Lanka and in Sri Lankan disapora locations, including Australia, England, Canada and the US. Alexandra Watkins's Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora offers a sound critique of significant work by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser, Yasmine Gooneratne, Chandani Lokuge, Karen Roberts, Roma Tearne and V.V. Ganeshananthan. These writers, despite having been well received by the Western academia, have gained, suggests Watkins, 'considerably less critical attention than their more prominent male counterparts - Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, A. Sivanandan, and Shyam Selvadurai' (2). The book, containing five chapters plus introduction and conclusion, offers a 'culturally extensive reading' (2) through the lens of Watkins's gender-specific approach.The first chapter, 'Mimicry and Detection: Dismantling Identity in Michelle de Kretser's The Hamilton Case', critically argues de Kretser's novel through the theoretical contours of 'mimicry', inaugurated by V.S. Naipaul in his novel, The Mimic Men and in turn theoretically postulated by Homi K. Bhabha. Watkins also engages with Said, Fanon, and Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin. Subsequently, Watkins unravels 'the phenomenon of British mimicry in the Indian subcontinent' (4) through a rigorous review of Macaulay's in/famous Minute on Education prior to analysing de Kretser's text.The next chapter, 'In Fear of Monsters: Women's Identities and the Cult of Domesticity in British Ceylon,' compares de Kretser's The Hamilton Case with Gooneratne's The Sweet and Simple Kind, since both 'focus on the spectacle of colonial domesticity' (41). Watkins critically studies these novels in the light of 'problematic identities' of female characters and their families. The chapter not only covers 'Victorian domesticity' but also engages with the 'competing ideology of Buddhist domesticity' to analyze the texts.Chapter Three, 'Combatting Myths: Racial and Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Sri Lanka,' reconnoiters three novels: Gooneratne's The Sweet and Simple Kind, as well as Tearne's Mosquito and Roberts's July. Watkins explores the multiple tinges of racial discrimination and their 'strife in Sri Lanka during ... the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict' (81). She unfolds the contemporary issues in the context of the Buddhist-Sinhalese nationalist-linguistic politic, the LTTE politic and the two groups conflictual catastrophes. …
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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 | 0.003 |
| 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 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".