Revisiting “Speak White”: A lieu de mémoire Lost and Found in Translation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces the afterlives of Michèle Lalonde’s 1968 poem “Speak White” to explore how translation contributes to constructing, renewing and transforming it as a lieu de mémoire through various transformative processes. The term “translation” here designates a phenomenon that includes but extends beyond the concept of translation as linguistic transfer to encompass different forms of rewriting, adaptation and remediation, foregrounding the generative aspect of the memory site as well as the tension between past and present, between a lieu de départ and its reinscription in a new context. Specifically, it focuses on two English translations of “Speak White” that attempt to reconstruct the poem’s subversive diglossia; Marco Micone’s 1989 poem “Speak What,” as a rewriting that takes the form of serious parody; two adaptations produced during the 2012 Quebec Student Strike, “Speak Red” and “Speak rich en tabarnaque”; and the latest incarnation of “Speak White” in Robert Lepage’s 887 , a theatrical production that introduces its own layers of intertemporal, intermedial and interlingual complexity. These recreations of “Speak White” reveal how a lieu de mémoire can be simultaneously anchored or re-anchored in the past while also being renewed or rerouted through translation in the present across languages, cultures, media and time.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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".