The Postcolonial Flâneur: Open City and the Urban Palimpsest
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using reading, specifically Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading, as a metaphor for walking the city, I examine how the postcolonial flâneur re-reads New York back into history in Teju Cole’s Open City . The narrator’s palimpsestic walks through New York enable readers to situate the city’s global identity in a longer colonial and postcolonial history, challenging ahistorical characterizations of global cities. Coupled with the principles of nineteenth-century French flâneire, the postcolonial perspective offers a way to re-see the urban landscape through a dialectical insider/outsider position, enabling a critique of the complicity between globalization and capitalism in marginalizing voices and histories. Furthermore, my argument suggests that the novel challenges the celebratory cosmopolitan narratives that praise the rise of the global citizen while ignoring the plight of the unhomely.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it