Central Margins: Paradox and Transformation of Dichotomies in Two English Language Novels by Mauritian Lindsey Collen
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Indian Ocean region embodies the paradox of a marginalized crossroads. Its islands and coastal societies reflect the multiple influences of its position as a commercial center during colonization and accompanying slave trade. Yet its island nations, particularly their literature, are little known relative to their mainland Asian and African counterparts. Mauritius further reflects these ironies. Although Mauritius has attained a positive reputation for stability, growth, and tourist appeal, deep inequalities resulting from economic globalization persist, to the detriment of its citizens. Uninhabited until the arrival of the Dutch in the sixteenth century, its national identity is the most multicultural of the Indian Ocean islands. Despite its history as a British colony and the designation of English as the language of school instruction and government administration, English-language Mauritian literature remains scarce. A primary exception is the work of novelist Lindsey Collen. This paper examines Collen’s There Is a Tide and The Rape of Sita as examples that reveal margin and center as imagined divisions, created by patriarchal assumptions about power and humans’ relationship to the earth. Theories of hybridity and postcolonialism, as well as of feminism, eco-feminism, and ecocriticism, introduced to challenge these assumptions, have revealed both deeply intertwined concepts and continuing problems of cultural domination, despite efforts to counter legacies of colonial injustices. The reactive nature of many of these theories and the advocacy on which they are based ironically often reinforce the aforementioned dichotomies between center and margins. Collen’s novels deconstruct and transform these dichotomies by narrating the human condition across gender, class, nation, and time in ways that are difficult (if not impossible) to do through theoretical categorization.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| 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".