Taphonomic Historiography: Excavating and Exhuming the Past in Suzan-Lori Parks’s<i>The America Play</i>
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
This essay examines Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play from an ecocritical perspective, analysing the play’s use of soil and its somatic, social, ecological, and historical significance. Taphonomy and historiography are put into conversation, as both disciplines investigate the processes that govern the persistence of remains over time and, thus, generate tools for theatre and performance studies. The essay contends that the Foundling Father’s repetitive digging in the soil communicates meaning regarding the history of antebellum slaves in the United States. It employs Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of affect and immanent philosophy to argue that the Foundling Father becomes Lincoln in the affective sense, as he unearths what Deleuze and Guattari call “concepts” that “reterritorialize” history. Layered on the imagery of slavery and predicated on a literal descent into historical earth, this affective relationship allows for a powerful interrogation and reconstruction of the dominant narratives of history.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 it