Bibliographic record
Abstract
The official policy of Canadian multiculturalism would have it that immigrants might ‘fully participate in Canadian society’ while still ‘[identifying] with the cultural heritage of their choice’. Arnold Itwaru, in his The Invention of Canada, argues that Canadian immigration narratives work to undermine the official doctrine by exposing the very paradox of such a program and, consequently, destabilising the Canadian desire for a unified multicultural nation. Rawi Hage’s recently published novel Cockroach facilitates examination of how the contemporary immigrant experience in practice reveals the flaws inherent in the ideals of Canadian multiculturalism. Hage suggests that in order for the nameless narrator to ‘fully participate in Canadian society’, which here means (among other things) getting a job and surviving, he must first begin a process of self-erasure, eliminating the parts of his heritage that exist outside of social and cultural acceptability. The narrator is, in fact, unable to blend the two possibilities suggested in Canada’s multiculturalism policy; rather he wavers between two seemingly bleak positions - the conforming exotic immigrant and the nonconforming cockroach. The narrator strives to fit into normal, legitimate, acceptable society because his very survival depends upon it. But, in order to do so, he must transform himself into someone he is not. I argue that the novel offers the concept of a liminal space between human and cockroach as a space of possibility for the immigrant. A recent convention of contemporary Canadian literature is to position characters (often nameless) within a liminal space that is specifically a generative space. Hage’s similar positioning of his own narrator is crucial to my discussion.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".