Racialized rooms and technologies of stardom in Ondaatje’s <i>Coming Through Slaughter</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on recent theories of race from critical race theory, this article examines Michael Ondaatje’s 1976 novel Coming Through Slaughter to assess the involvement, or lack, of technologies of stardom such as photography and radio in the celebrity of the fictionalized jazz musician Charles “Buddy” Bolden. This essay builds on established postcolonial and aesthetic readings, and offers an alternative to the often-held view that Ondaatje is not concerned by race, or the suggestion that he is only preoccupied by art and artists. Its textual focus is an interpretation of the counterfactual (put differently, anachronistic) scene involving a radio and scenes related to the darkroom and the racial significance of its black and white negatives. It argues that these technologies “colour” the rooms in which they are found and thereby complicate ideas of domestic privacy and opposing publicity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".