The Unsettling Portrayal of Migrant Existence in Rawi Hage’s Urban Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers the function of the grotesque mode in Rawi Hage’s novels 'Cockroach' (2008) and 'Carnival' (2012). The grotesque is a provocative tool with which Hage draws attention to the predicament of the class of poor and disadvantaged new immigrants in contemporary Montreal. He offers a male immigrant’s unsettling perspective on the Canadian multicultural ideal that proclaims the acceptance of ethnic and racial difference. Formal aspects that generate a grotesque effect include the first-person narrator’s self-image, his disruptive discourse of resistance, his disorienting view of urban reality, and spatial metaphors in the context of the protagonist’s social alienation and marginalisation. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection throws light on the sense of fear and repulsion felt towards the urban poor, and on the protagonist’s deliberate identification with vermin in the context of his discourse of resistance. Even though the underprivileged migrant is able to answer back, Hage’s novels are devoid of true regenerative and liberating power. The literary texts give prominence to the migrant’s isolation and socio-economic outsider position. Nonetheless, the grotesque mode also functions as a powerful tool with which the author depicts the recent immigrant as someone with a resilient and mobile identity.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| 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".