“Qui sont-je?” Multilingual Entanglements in Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s Porcelain Moon and Pomegranates: A Woman’s Trek through Turkey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian writer Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s plural self-translations at the crossroads of different cultures she has traversed during her life trajectory from Turkey to Canada and back to Turkey. I read her hybrid translingual family memoir-travel narrative for evidence of productive potentialities of multilingualism in cross-cultural encounters. Woven into the text are complex multilingual entanglements of her many languages, histories, and geographies, as she passes from Turkish to English and French while immersing herself in the stories told in Dene, the language of the Sayisi Dene in northern Manitoba, and collects Kurdish stories from southeastern Anatolia, translated into Turkish. In 1997, with Ila Bussidor, Üstün Bilgen-Reinart co-authoredNight Spirits, an oral history of the forcible relocation and subsequent rebuilding of the Sayisi Dene community. Bilgen-Reinart’s perception of the present-day situation in Turkey, after her thirty-year stay in Canada where she worked as a CBC journalist, is influenced by Indigenous knowledges that she has been exposed to and by her transnational feminist consciousness. Her life writing affords a unique possibility for exploring the intersections of migrant, diasporic, and Indigenous histories through affective theorizing of the wounds of trauma, displacement, and dispossession. Constructing the “I”-witness position vis-à-vis the disastrous social, political, cultural, and ecological consequences of colonialism and globalization, her text explores relational linkages that extend beyond the singular self and create connections between multiple bodies, lives, and their environments. Her practice of drawing complex webs of meaning can be read in terms of decolonial multilingual languaging.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".