Taphonomic Historiography: Excavating and Exhuming the Past in Suzan-Lori Parks’s<i>The America Play</i>
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.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".