Island Mentality: Mapping “de globality ov it all” between Jamaica, England, and Australia in Maxine Beneba Clarke’s “Big Islan”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Maxine Beneba Clarke’s story “Big Islan,” from her collection Foreign Soil (2014), charts unexpected Australian-Caribbean connections, exploring colonialism, globalisation and “island mentalities.” Subverting three colonial institutions (language, map-making, cricket), Clarke reveals ambivalent, decolonising potential in celebrating Caribbean experience. Patois narration focalises Caribbean reality and Nathanial Robinson’s beloved home, 1960s Kingston, which he considers centre of “de globality ov it all”. However, the West Indies’ celebrated “Calypso Summer” cricket tour of Australia makes Nathanial restless and he considers leaving his “small-tiny islan” for the island-continent where Black men are “kings”. Clarke ironically exposes the story’s historical context: terra nullius and the White Australia Policy. The reader maps apparently disparate but actually deeply connected histories, participating in story-telling’s “total expression” (Brathwaite). The coordinates are set by Clarke, who constructs a literary archipelago of islands; a counternarrative to colonial/multiculturalist belonging.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".