Bibliographic record
Abstract
Laura SalviniLUIS S University (Rome, Italy)Science fiction is a rough terrain. Writers, critics, and readers fiercely defend the genre, patrolling its boundaries and excluding texts they find unsuitable for the moniker Nalo Hopkinson's debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), is generously celebrated for the Caribbean background and magic realism intertwined in the story, but its scientific references are often treated as less central the text. In my opinion, such an approach overlooks Hopkinson's flair in mastering science fiction literary conventions. Furthermore, this approach belittles the role minorities can play in contributing the genre. Before fully advancing this thread of my argument, I will briefly focus on the figure of Legba, or Legbara in the novel, and the linguistic strategy Hopkinson uses set her narrative in a Caribbean context, before analyzing in what way religion and traditional knowledge handed down from Haitian and Caribbean culture contributes the novelty that is constitutive of science fiction. This article intends pinpoint the reasons why Brown Girl in the Ring deserves a place inside the speculative fiction territory, and show how, by deploying the very conventions of genre, Hopkinson casts the Caribbean minority as the predestinated savior of a near-future Canada in disarray, and casts Caribbean religious practices as both generating and regenerating a multi-layered global identity.Divine Link MakerPapa come and open the gatePapa the city of campsNow we're your children,come and ride your horseIn the night, in the night,come and ride your horse.1In 1986, Papa found his way into pop culture in at least two occasions. David Byrne evoked him in a song written for the soundtrack of his movie, True Stories, and William Gibson gave him a role in Count £ero, the second volume of his Sprawl Trilogy. The entry Legba in the Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora reads [o]ften referred as 'keeper of the gates' and 'keeper of the crossroads,' is the Lwa (force over deity/divinity) that sustains communication among all of the Lwas and between the Lwa and devotees in the Haitian and African Diasporan Vodoun tradition.2 As a guardian of the crossroads and a facilitator of communication between the spiritual and the material, Papa is appealing artists, like Byrne and Gibson, whom have been experimenting with the interaction of different cultures, media, and technologies. In the 1980s, the fusion of electronic sounds with ethnic rhythms in music as well as the rise of cyberpunk, with its mixture of high-tech achievements and dystopian societies, offered an avant-garde touch in outlining the features of the globalization process, by challenging the fixity of traditional identities in favor of the potential of cultural cross-fertilization. No wonder Gibson affirmed in an interview that [t]he only native culture [he] ever had was science fiction and rock 'n' roll.3 In the same 2007 interview, Gibson was questioned as how he first came upon voodoo [sic], and its Afro-Cuban relative, Santeria, which also has a crucial role in his novel Spook Country (2007).4 He explained that as a twelve-year-old boy reading a book about Vodou in New Orleans, he was impressed by how much the ritual symbols for the different gods resembled the circuit diagrams. As a result, he began to wonder what would happen if you wired those circuits, and so a futuristically syncretic Papa Legba, symbolized by the filigreed pattern of an embryonic microchip, became a character in Count %ero.Twelve years later, in Brown Girl in the Ring, Legbara appears as the Eshu of the main character, Ti-Jeanne. He makes his appearance in chapter five, when the protagonist's grandmother, Gros-Jeanne, performs a rite according the traditional dictates. In a basket, she has collected a set of objects please Legbara: a flask of rum and a margarine tub filled with cornmeal, homemade candies, a pack of matches, and a cigar. …
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".