An Education: Race, Class and the Rhizomorphic Bildungsroman in Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines Erna Brodber’s 1980 Jamaican experimental novel <em>Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home</em>. In contrast to readings that emphasize the protagonist Nellie Richmond’s journey from psychological fragmentation to wholeness, the essay argues that there is instead a dispersal of Nellie’s identity where no psychic wholeness of the self or the collective happens. Here, Brodber employs a non-linear and polyvocal version of the Bildungsroman genre—a coming of age tale of growth and development from childhood to adulthood. The article explores this literary genre in relation to various regulative frameworks, which recast ‘contexts’ as the perpetual social production, conditioning, transformation and regulation of identity, spectatorship, subjectivity, psychology and behavior. In its exploration of Nellie’s life history within these regulative frameworks, Brodber’s unusual rhizomorphic (or rhizomatic) version of the Bildungsroman exists at the intersection of postcolonial and postmodern narrative forms and critically reworks the category of ‘progress,’ both personal and cultural-historical. More specifically, Nellie’s informal education about her tangled family and community history as well as various formal educational situations in Jamaica and the United States amplify tensions between race and class that help her to denaturalize and critique both. Indeed, she navigates her ambivalent relationship to those terms in relation to both Afro-Caribbean and Euro-American culture. This critique makes her character both idiosyncratic and representational, illustrating that identity, both individual and collective, is fragmented rather than unified.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".