Memorial Traces as Tropes of Postcolonial Hauntings in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord and Nina Bouraoui’s Mes mauvaises pensées
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a comparative analysis of the language of memory in two auto-fictional narratives by two postcolonial francophone authors of mixed background, belonging to the area of Québec (Robert Lalonde) and Algeria (Nina Bouraoui). It will be argued that both authors seek to deconstruct the binary relationship of the spaces and identities they each belong to (white-Amerindian for Robert Lalonde vs. Franco-Algerian for Nina Bouraoui) through a specific poetics of writing or language of memory. At the same time, they each return cyclically in their writing to the postcolonial spaces, memories and histories of their respective non-Western cultures, as if ‘haunted’ by these spaces. Using the method of close textual reading in a comparative postcolonial francophone context, the article aims to show how the language of memory is deployed in the two narratives chosen. It demonstrates that both authors use the figure of the memorial trace as a trope of haunting in order to construct that language. It concludes that the figures of memory identified in the two texts analyzed give rise to a series of ‘postcolonial hauntings’ producing a postcolonial discourse of ambiguity rather than resistance.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".