Black Slavery in Canada: A Structuring Absence in Canada's (Hi)Stories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In national as well as international terms, Canada holds the image of a savior of African slaves, even though in the recent production The Book of Negroes (CAN/USA 2015) a more critical depiction of Canada is presented. The question, however, remains whether the miniseries, with its admission of discrimination and racism, actually rebuts previously established myths of Canada’s relation to slavery. Due to the virtual absence of Canada from the screen when it comes to slave narratives, very little attention has been paid so far to a Canadian perspective in analyzing such artifacts. By looking at the representation of Canada’s relationship with black slavery on film and television, I search for patterns and discursive moves which maintain a distance from addressing the country’s own slaving past. I apply a critical discourse analytical approach in order to unveil the meanings and cultural implications of information-omission from screen. The overall purpose of my argument is to show that by focusing exclusively on the significantly larger contribution of the United States to the practice, artifacts reinforce the popular notion of Canada’s innocence in the enslavement of human beings.
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 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 | 0.002 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 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".