In Search of a "Grammar for Black": Africa and Africans in Lawrence Hill's Works
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Black Canadian writers have devised various terms to situate themselves and their imagined community in relation to the African motherlands and to map out their black identities on North American soil. Among these labels are “Afrospora” (Marlene NourbeSe Philip), “blacks in the diaspora” (Dionne Brand), “Afroperiphery” (Wayde Compton), and “Africadia” (George Elliott Clarke). Underlying all these concepts is what Rinaldo Walcott has called a “grammar” of blackness, that is, an attempt to examine the different ways black people are racialized in Canada. Starting from these considerations, in this essay I will discuss Lawrence Hill’s nonfictional treatment of Africa alongside his fictional rendering of some parts of the continent and of its inhabitants, as the former throws into relief many aspects of the latter. Bringing them together will provide key information as to how the conceptualization of Africanness functions within Hill’s investigation of racial identities in North America and how it may fit within a black Atlantic model that resists essentialization.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".