North American Counterterritoriality: Nineteenth-Century Black Activism and Alternative Legal Spatiality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution uses the terms “territoriality” and “legal spatiality” to consider how they shape our understanding of the significance of the North American border between the US and Canada (British North America) in the nineteenth century. It looks, first, at the ways in which Black intellectual leaders constructed Upper Canada as a counterterritory to the United States in the context of debating Black emigration by combining politics and geography to challenge conflicting territorialities. Canada’s ambiguous position as a safe haven under the British lion’s paw that was formerly invested in slavery and the slave trade is reinforced, second, by the increasing numbers of black fugitives onto its territories. This perceived mass exodus provoked aggressive reactions from US slaveholders who relied on the fugitive slave laws to lay claims on their “property” in the form of fugitive slave extradition cases. The activism by Black communities along the border that emerged from the crises to save fugitives from being returned to bondage, this contribution shows, enacted a form of counterterritoriality that called on the British imperial center to challenge the legality of slavery, introducing alternative forms of “legal spatiality.”
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".