"Not this, not that" : in-between identities in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How useful is it to define Canadian literature as postcolonial literature? Can we talk about Canadian multicultural identities as postcolonial, or has the adjective "postcolonial" lost its usefulness when discussing "Canadian identity" as an umbrella term? Has "postcolonial" instead become reserved for the description of only a part of its spectrum: the hyphenated and/or immigrant identities coming from (other) former British colonies, now settled in Canada? The paper addresses these questions by focusing on the novel The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji (2003). Following the unravelling of the main character's memories and the juxtaposition of his life as an immigrant in Canada in the present to his life as a descendant of Indian immigrants in Kenya in the past, the paper analyzes the ways in which the novel debates the key issues of belonging, race and dislocation and their relation to the idea of individual identity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".