The “Con” in Conspiracy: Racial Violence as Political Assassination in Suzan-Lori Parks’s <i>Topdog/Underdog</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article argues that Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer-prize winning play Topdog/Underdog (1999) mobilizes a conspiracy theory concept of anti-black violence in America. The highly discursive play depicts a pair of black brothers named Lincoln and Booth as they banter, argue, and compete with each other over games of three-card monte. In the final scene of the play, the brothers fulfil the destiny inscribed in their names: Booth shoots and kills his brother Lincoln after a dispute over their meager inheritance. The play frames this final act of brutal fratricide as a form of political assassination in order to activate the rescaling that comes with a conspiracy theory lexicon: Topdog/Underdog formulates a generative and radically resistant conspiratorial conception of anti-black violence that ultimately enables a genuine confrontation with the origins and structures of racialized oppression. The play thus belongs to a lineage of works by black writers that have wielded a paranoid aesthetic in order to galvanize a revolutionary opposition to the structures of racial oppression. This tradition includes authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and, most explicitly, John A. Williams, whose novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) emerges in the article as a precedent for the conspiratorial racial politics of Parks’s play. In its own interpretation of paranoid anti-racist critique, Topdog/Underdog elaborates a concept of conspiracy without intentionality whose hierarchies, despite being beyond the parameters of any single individual or collective entity’s agency, can nonetheless be undermined and, ultimately, toppled.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".