A tale of two fighters: images of child soldiers in Jewish and African child soldier narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay I examine the representations of child soldiers in Yuri Suhl’s Uncle Misha’s Partisans and Emmanuel Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog. While Suhl’s novel recreates the historical fact of Jewish children’s involvement in the organized group of resistance fighters – called the Jewish Partisans – during the Second World War and in that sense serves to recreate the history of Jewish child soldiering, Dongala’s narrative portrays a conflict in which children are instrumentalized as soldiers in a war propelled by mere avarice, the fighters as ideologically barren, and the children involved as mainly innocent victims of adults’ myopia. In comparatively examining these two narratives, I argue that, whereas Suhl offers a positive portraiture of Jewish child soldiers as patriotic beings with agency and voice and constructs a far more nuanced perspective of childhood innocence, Dongala in his own work represents African child soldiers in familiarly negative light.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".