Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cristina M. Gamez-Fernandez and Antonia Navarro-Tejero, eds. India in the World. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Pp. xvii, 305. US$75.99. I'm asking my university library to buy India in the World and plan to assign chapters from this book in my postcolonial literature courses this year. Why? Because more than a few of the essays are exactly what I have been looking for as a teacher and scholar of postcolonial literature. The range of authors and genres covered make this book a rich resource. There are essays analyzing novels by writers often considered canonical to postcolonial literature such as Anita Desai, R.K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie. There are also essays on less canonical writers such as Ananda Devi (Indo-Mauritian Francophone writer of Telegu descent), Manju Kapur (Delhi-based Anglophone writer), and Sunny Singh (London-based Anglophone writer). Despite this emphasis on novels and novelists, those interested in other forms of cultural production such as poetry, art, film, and comics need not despair. Of particular interest is Joel Kuortti's 'City and Non-City': Political Issues in In Which Annie Gives It Mose Ones, which analyzes, contextualizes, and contrasts Arundhati Roy's lesser-known screenplay (and later film) of the same title against her well-known novel The God of Small Things. Another highlight of this book's range is that its topics vary across time, space, and perspective in unexpected ways. It is not often that one comes across a book that offers insight into the Indian response to El Quijote and how the principles of Sanskrit poetics open up J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man! The variety of perspectives also extends to approaches to literary analysis and cultural studies--from analyzing the modernist aestheticism in Anita Desai's fiction to a feminist reading of R.K. Narayan's The Dark Room. Aside from its engaging breadth, most of the essays in this book excel at offering the seemingly elusive yet increasingly necessary combination of being short and effectively contextual. Since the essays average ten pages each, with the longest essay being only twenty pages long, they are an ideal source of readings for undergraduate students. The best part is that such brevity does not come at the expense of context. Indeed, this is one of the few collections of short essays that offers the necessary historical, cultural, or theoretical context for readers to grasp the significance of the argument and analysis presented. The advantages of such efficiently contextual essays cannot be over-emphasized. Felicity Hand's From Inscrutable Indians to Asian Africans, for instance, because it presents an overview of the South Asian presence in East Africa before, during, and after colonization, could profitably accompany a study of East Africa not just in literary studies such as a reading of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not, Child but also in cultural studies, especially of race and ethnicity in Uganda and Kenya. It also moves students and scholars alike from a more simplistic black-white binary in African studies to a more nuanced one by introducing hybrid writers like M.G. Vassanji who was born in Nairobi of parents of Indian descent ... grew up in Dar es Salaam, studied in the United States and now resides in Canada (81). …
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.009 |
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".