N’Zid? Zid!: Mediterranean Archives and Postcolonial Translation in the Time of Amnesia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My contribution to this volume interrogates the time and space of postcolonial translation through two items, read through the lens of a Mediterranean archive. The first is Algerian novelist Malika Mokeddem’s 2001 novel N’Zid. The second object is Frantz Fanon’s multilingual passport, located at the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) archive in Normandy. Published in French and not formally translated, N’Zid is a novel requiring translation— between desert and sea, North and South Mediterraneans, Arabic and French, the decolonial and postcolonial, the space of the archive, and memory and forgetting, in what I am calling the time of amnesia. Memory and forgetting are times of translation for both objects, one floating in Mediterranean space, the other buried in a French archive. The archive necessitates translation, perhaps a very specific kind of translation. Fanon himself becomes translated and strangely silenced in the archive, located at the polar opposite coordinates of his political life—Algeria translated back into Normandy/metropolitan France. A curious burial. Fanon and his passport, as well as N’Zid are chronotopes in the Bakhtinian sense. Bakhtin calls a chronotope ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (84). Both objects will be mapped out, recovered naufrages in a space-time specific to the Mediterranean pasts and postcolonial afterlives.
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 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 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".