Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism and the Animal in Recent Canadian Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Huggan’s essay argues the case for a productive alliance between postcolonialism and ecocriticism and acknowledges that such a case is not immediately persuasive. Deep ecologists might argue that postcolonial criticism has been, and remains, resolutely human-centred (anthropocentric). Committed first and foremost to the struggle for social justice, postcolonial critics have been insufficiently attuned to life-centred (bio-or ecocentric) issues and concerns. A growing body of work exists, however, to suggest a convergence between the interests of postcolonial and ecologically minded critics. Huggan examines debates about the parallels between racism and speciesism before he looks at two recent Canadian novels in which the production of a nonhuman “ecological subject” by no means precludes human social and political concerns. The novels are Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2002) and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998). In the course of his analysis Huggan gauges the implications of the differences between the presentation of the human and animal worlds respectively, given the novels’ ‘postcolonial’ status. He considers their respective engagement with the racism/speciesism nexus, and their treatment of the discourses of both human and animal liberation, particularly with regard to the captivity of animals and to the alleged violation, through captivity, of their basic moral rights.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".