“Stories that Never Stop”: Fugitivity and Neo-Slave Performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines contemporary black plays that both align with and depart from the neo-slave narrative, the most prominent form of contemporary literary engagement with slavery. Focusing on Lydia Diamond’s Harriet Jacobs (2008) and Nathan Alan Davis’s Nat Turner in Jerusalem, I argue that contemporary black plays on slavery constitute neo-slave performance insofar as they introduce the body, visuality, and various performance technologies to address aspects of slavery for which the written word cannot fully account. Harriet Jacobs and Nat Turner in Jerusalem demonstrate drama’s expansive capacity to represent slavery because they reframe slavery’s graphic economies and the historical depictions of captive black bodies while also intervening in the canonical narrative accounts of Harriet Jacobs and Nat Turner. These plays can be understood as performing fugitivity: they advance an artistic and political effort on the part of black subjects, past and present, to evade objectification and one-dimensional representations of slavery and blackness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 teacher head, 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".