Another 1987, or Whiteness and Eighteenth-Century Studies
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
This essay re-evaluates the place of Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum’s The New Eighteenth Century (1987) in our historiography of our own field, arguing that its reception and ensuing debates about theory and politics in eighteenth-century studies enabled the misrecognition of the true challenge that postcolonial eighteenth-century scholarship posed to the field in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The central terms of these initial debates primed eighteenth-century scholarship to understand race and empire primarily as topics that politicized theoretical inquiry might pursue, rather than as foundational material structures that implicate us and our work in our objects of study. This narrative of field-formation, by taking the reception of The New Eighteenth Century as the template for methodological revision more generally, continues to characterize race and empire as topics that were successfully “included” decades ago rather than attend to the ongoing structural coloniality and whiteness of the field itself.
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) | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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