Toxic Imperialism: Memory, Erasure, and Environmental Injustice in David Chariandy's Soucouyant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical literature on David Chariandy’s Soucouyant has explored the dementia suffered by the protagonist’s mother Adele as a metaphor for the erasure of Black experience from cultural memory and dominant historical narratives, and as a response to the traumatic effects of imperialism. “Toxic Imperialism” builds on these critical insights, while mapping new critical terrain to argue that in Chariandy’s novel, dementia is both an effect and symptom of the multiple sites of chemical exposure that disproportionately impact low income communities of color. From Adele’s and Roger’s birthplace in Trinidad, to their home and work environments in Canada, the family’s multiple encounters with unequally borne byproducts of industrial production are inseparably linked to legacies of colonialism and racism. The analysis traces the roots of Adele’s trauma in environmental and cultural disruptions wrought by the U.S. military occupation of Trinidad during World War II, while also examining the novel’s critique of Canada’s discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism, and its relevance to Indigenous-Black solidarity to address racism, white supremacy, and injustices in Canada. In its attention to epistemologies of memory and multigenerational effects of (neo)colonialism, Soucouyant is a literary intervention in support of local and global decolonization struggles for social, environmental, and ecological justice. Both authors contributed equally to this work.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".