National Roots and Diasporic Routes: Tracing the Flying African Myth in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite scholarly agreement that the Flying African myth has emerged throughout the Americas from every location with a history of transatlantic slavery, this article is the first to analyze that myth in Canada. Taking this scholarly absence as evidence for larger erasures of Black culture in Canada, I trace variations of the myth in order to reframe the nation’s ambivalent history of transatlantic slavery. Dominant narratives commemorate the Underground Railroad while ignoring the country’s longer collusion in slavery and racial oppression. Comparing iterations of this myth across Canada—and considering these in light of Caribbean, Latin American, and US versions—offers a unique opportunity to theorize the relationships between nation, diaspora, and the histories of transatlantic slavery. Moreover, the multiplicity of identifications and definitions of Blackness in Canada offers a particularly salient microcosm for theorizing the diaspora writ large. In particular, I consider the Flying African myth within the specific context of Black Canada to expand on Gilroy’s project in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".