The Roach’s Revenge: Suicide and Survival in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
What does it mean to “exist and not to belong?” asks the narrator of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (210). This article analyses the themes of exile and alienation in Cockroach in relation to current discourses of global migration and state surveillance. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the refugee as “pure man” (116), I argue that Hage’s novel calls into question the degree to which the discourse of the human (and human rights) can exist beyond state apparatuses of citizenship and belonging and how refugees, migrants, and sans papiers are excluded from the “realm of common humanity” (Razack, Dark Threats 8) via state apparatuses of security and surveillance. Examining the novel as a revenge narrative, I focus on how Cockroach’s unnamed protagonist—an impoverished Arab migrant living in Montreal—shifts between human and insect form to indicate how the discourse of the human fails to create the political and socio-economic conditions necessary for his survival.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it