Voicing the absented presence of blackness in Canada: a multimodal critical discourse analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Canada makes of multiculturalism its trademark in a process caught between a (yet to come) full openness toward cultural and linguistic diversity, and the removal of an ambiguous collective memory rooted in racio-cultural violence. One that at different times in Canadian history considered Black people unwanted citizens, making of their experience an “absented presence” within the Canadian discourse. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the aim of this essay is to investigate the retrieval of part of that absented presence through an exploration of the 2015 miniseries The Book of Negroes (dir. Clement Virgo) which traces the life story of the West African storyteller Aminata Diallo as she is captured, sold into slavery and then slowly regains her freedom. The essay focuses on the analysis of the different semiotic resources employed in the miniseries and on the way a reflection of their co-articulation contributes not only to the meaning-making potential of the narrative but also to a specific response in the audience. The multiple ‘languages’ of storytelling through which Aminata’s story unfolds emphasise the need for a rethinking of national belonging by way of privileging diasporic affiliations that reject the violence inherent in monolithic and appropriating discourses.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 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".