Getting Under the Skin: Antiblackness, Proximity, and Resistance in the <i>SLĀV</i> Affair
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
SLĀV is a musical stage play directed by Robert Lepage, and based on recordings by singer Béatrice “Betty” Bonifassi. The recordings are Bonifassi’s reinterpretations of music composed by enslaved and incarcerated African Americans—that is Black people labouring under, and resisting, the conditions of slavery and its afterlife. Though Lepage and Bonifassi promoted the show as an homage to Black people, SLĀV opened at the 2018 Montreal International Jazz Festival to protests by the SLĀV Resistance Collective, accusing it of cultural appropriation. SLĀV was eventually cancelled as Black artists began pulling out of the festival. Unsurprisingly, Lepage, Bonifassi and much of the Quebec public accused the protestors of censorship, and of misunderstanding Quebec’s unique context. Situating its analysis within the field of Black Canadian Studies, in this article Howard examines the discourse around SLĀV as manifested through the words of Bonifassi, Lepage, journalists, and commenters. Howard argues that SLĀV instantiates the broader context of antiblackness in Quebec, and pays particular attention to gestures of inclusion and proximity consistent with modes of slavery and its afterlife in New France/Quebec. These gestures attempt to contain Blackness within national, linguistic, and other boundaries, disciplining the ways it is allowed to assert itself. Black resistance must therefore defy these boundaries and claim solidarity between and across variously located Black people.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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