Old and New Spaces: Imagining Exclusion and Inclusion in Austin Clarke’s “Four Stations in His Circle” and Shani Mootoo’s “Out on Main Street”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay deals with the fictional creation of such geographies of exclusion and inclusion in two selected short stories by Canadian authors that were written roughly thirty years apart and focus on diasporic identities in radically different ways: Austin Clarke, “Four Stations in His Circle” (1965; 1971 When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks) on the one hand, and Shani Mootoo, “Out on Main Street” (1993), on the other. My aim is to investigate the ways in which urban space is used in the stories as a strategy for including or excluding otherness, by paying special attention to fictional representations of space and to configurations of human relationships within space. I would like to suggest, firstly, that the two stories illustrate that there is a significant shift in focus in novels and short stories about the Canadian city, from a multiculturalist to a new, globalized ethnic diversity, and that this change is conditioned by demographic changes in urban environments and the advancement of globalization; and, secondly, I maintain that characters configure their relationships of inclusion and exclusion to the city in terms of consuming its space. In addition to concentrating on notions of literary representation of space and identity typical of literature as a medium, the following analysis also pays attention to the generation of urban space. It is informed by a vocabulary and methodology borrowed from cultural studies, namely from Stuart Hall’s work on identity as difference, and from anthropology, in particular from Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson’s 1992 essay, “Beyond Culture.” After an individual analysis illustrating the arguments formulated in this introduction, the final part of the paper, using Hall’s and Gupta and Ferguson’s texts, places the stories in a theoretical and comparative perspective in order to outline the fundamental conceptual differences on which they rely.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".