Conduct Discourse, Slave Narratives, and Black Male Self-Fashioning on the Eve of the Civil War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, Erica Ball focuses on how male-authored slave narratives of the 1850s might be reconsidered as part of a wider conduct discourse depicting what it meant to live “an antislavery life,” itself a form of activism against the slavery system. Taken up by, and often presented to, African Americans as examples of masculine self-transformation, narratives authored by Samuel Ringgold Ward, Solomon Northup, Jermain W. Loguen, and Frederick Douglass taught readers that “dedication to education, morality, and the Protestant work ethic were essential for becoming self-made men.” At the same time, they also reinforced the very same anxieties and ideals articulated in free Black middle-class conduct literature. Ball reenvisions the complex cultural and political work of masculine self-making undertaken by antebellum Black autobiography as exceeding the slave narrative. The result challenges our reading of the slave narrative as emerging within abolitionist politics and focused on proving the violences of (largely southern) slavery and the authority of Black writers who had experienced them. Rather, such narratives testified to an “emerging Black middle-class identity and political culture” that also contested a racial capitalist logic of accounting for Black citizenship.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".