‘They can fly’: The Postcolonial Black Body in Nalo Hopkinson’s Speculative Short Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Caribbean-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson prefaces one of her short stories in the collection Skin Folk (2001) with the following lines of poetry, written by her father, artist Slade Hopkinson: ‘These are the latitudes of ex-colonized, of degradation still unmollified’ (183). Hopkinson, using the flexibility afforded by speculative fiction, symbolizes this degradation physically through her characters’ bodies in her short stories. Each of her protagonists must overcome their perceived or real physical imperfections in order to achieve some sort of internal balance and happiness, or as Hopkinson puts it in the preface, ‘whatever burdens their skins bear, once they remove them […] they can fly’ (1). In each case, the degradation and physical deformity can be traced back to injuries caused by their postcolonial condition. Using the story ‘A Habit of Waste’ as a central basis of the analysis, this essay will outline the different ways Hopkinson interrogates and problematizes the postcolonial condition through the body. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".