“Take A Good Look At It”: Seeing Postcolonial Medianatures with Karen Tei Yamashita
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
Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita's book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it