The Nation Dreamt Whole: Mid-Century Canadian Political Fantasy and the NFB’s “- -<i>Of Japanese Descent</i>”: An Interim Report (1945)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Through an analysis of the NFB’s 1945 film“--Of Japanese Descent”: an Interim Report this article explores aspects of a specifically Canadian mid-century political imaginary characterized by very particular economic and racial anxieties. Faced by the emergence of new political economies—fascist and communist models that seemed capable of re-imagining the nation—as well as a broad sense for a debility or limit proper to capitalist liberal democracy, many people in this period began to fantasize about openly post-liberal Canadian futures. At the same time, the Canadian state was attempting to manage and control a narrative of national identity in the context of new flows of non-white immigrants. “--Of Japanese Descent”—a film produced by the Canadian state to positively re-frame the internment of Japanese Canadians during the war—attempts to resolve both vectors of anxiety simultaneously. The internment camp comes to be imagined as a kind of post-liberal utopia, a space of national fulfillment and purpose de-linked from the risks and aporias of liberal capitalism. What we call the “liberal concentration camp”, then, models an alternative, idealized Canadian future while simultaneously functioning as a kind of school or machine for the naturalization of “inadmissible” Japanese bodies. However, even as the film channels fascist and communist desires—for national oneness and economic solidarity respectively—it operates as a means of preparing the Canadian viewer for the re-integration of interned Japanese into their communities and in this sense is a very early snapshots of the limits and contradictions of liberal state multiculturalism in Canada.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".