Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay investigates Frank Paci’s dominant themes of death and life in Black Madonna and the author’s use of relics to retrace post-migrant spaces. I examine his connections between immigrant and post-immigrant generations in the microcosm of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the way he preserves memories of the past (family, work, religious practices) while refashioning an Italian regional identity from a deterritorialized position. My approach to the themes of death, life, Italianness, and gender relationships is shaped by Michel de Certeau’s theories of place and space. Relics are defined here as something that survives the passage of time––either at a specific location or across spatial movement––and is invested with a sense of devotion. My argument is that Paci’s writing is devotional insofar as it preserves the memory of immigrants by disseminating the text with different kinds of traces (e.g., human, behavioural, linguistic). In function, memories act as relics. However, Paci’s writing is ambivalent towards memory, since quests for emancipation are also forcefully voiced by the author as challenges to preservation. This tension is at the core of Black Madonna, where Italian immigrants, practices, and places are represented as outdated, dead, or doomed to disappear, and yet deserving recognition and affection. In my view, Paci’s writing is more compelling when the relic as “place” interacts with a narrative of practices (or operations) that defy stability and actualize “spaces.” I will refer to this as a narrative of mobilized relics. Relics are a valid analytical tool to investigate the ties with Italy and ethnicity in the passage from immigrants to post-immigrant generations, from one historical subject to another, both of which are liminally positioned between cultures. In this sense, Black Madonna’s exploration of an Italian-Canadian microcosm spurs further transnational investigations of contemporary Italian identity through the migrant intergenerational lens.
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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 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".