Always a Domestic?: The Question of Canadian Redemption and Belonging in Selected Literature by Black Canadian Writers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The narratives of black writers of Caribbean descent living in Canada provide a useful perspective on blacks and belonging in Canada. Their stories elevate the history and legacy of the Domestic Worker Program which from the 1950s brought young black women from the British Caribbean to Canada.1 This program began in an era when Canada's immigration policies severely restricted Caribbean people from migrating to and settling in Canada. These early immigrants were the forerunners of later streams of black immigrants from around the world. In my reading of a selection of fiction by Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, Cecil Foster, and David Chariandy, I argue that their narratives show that while immigration policies may have changed, the social positioning and inequalities imposed on the domestics still explain the social roles and positioning of blacks in Canada. These writers speculate whether, historically, the narrative of the black female in Canada is always to be imagined as a domestic.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.082 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".