"A Different Economy": Postcolonial Clearings in David Chariandy's Brother
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the tyranny of race and space as well as intrinsic rather than instrumental value in David Chariandy’s Brother (2017). Borrowing from the theories of critical race scholars including Rinaldo Walcott, Idil Abdillahi and Frantz Fanon, the paper argues for an economy privileging the value of human bonds over money. A response to dominant Canadian discourses which position Black men as criminals, Chariandy’s novel places a positive value on Black masculinities and communities haunted by law enforcement in their homes and small businesses. Deemed both “known to police” and a “problem,” the characters in Brother find refuge in what I call postcolonial clearings, which take the form of barbershops, hidden valleys, music and other characters. The article begins with the premise that Canada is colonized territory for Black people treated as second-class citizens. In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, the paper underscores the deaths of two Black men in the Toronto of the mid-1990s. Chariandy not only breathes life into Black men rendered nameless and faceless by powers-that-be, he also questions the central ideals and pillars of the Canadian nation-state.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".