An Arduous Ascension for Black Masculinity: Toward Subject Status in Austin Clarke’s “The Man”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Austin Clarke’s extensive body of work introduces characters whose contested subject status and representation serve to critique the ways in which Blackness is figured in Canada. In the short story “The Man,” Clarke interrogates the recognition and subject status afforded his protagonist, William Jefferson, by various entities in the course of his rather mundane and unremarkable life. What unfolds is Jefferson’s ascension toward a self-possessed and self-actualized subjectivity that is more reflective of the multiple expressions of Black masculinity in Canada. In this story, Clarke offers a vivid portrayal of both the absented and perceived brutish presence of Black masculinity. Despite the attention to reason and the cultivation of his mind, the corporeal in which the subjectivity of Jefferson rests—that is, his racialized, masculine, aging, ailing body—figures prominently. At the seat of contention in this article is how that body is received and regulated by external social forces that maintain rigid hierarchies of race, gender and class that work to exclude, harass and vilify Jefferson, the owner of this body. Clarke’s “The Man” thus skillfully and subtly tracks the trajectory of Othering through Jefferson’s negotiation of his subject status in Canada, illuminating the arduous task of asserting subjectivity in the process of claiming the nation as home.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".