“Unembedded, Disappeared”: Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Hyper/In/Visible Literary Celebrity
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her essays, Marlene NourbeSe Philip has been forthcoming about being “an unembedded, disappeared poet and writer in Canada” whose contributions to cultural life have been systematically obstructed, partly because of her public activism on behalf of Black communities. Her visibility is an oxymoronic, bedeviling combination of disappearance and unchosen hypervisibility, with the hypervisibility largely brought about by a radical misunderstanding and abjection of her work as a cultural activist. In this article, I examine how the “embedded, disappeared” and yet present, visible, audible literary and activist career of Marlene NourbeSe Philip challenges prevailing conceptions of authorship in Canada. In particular, I think about how and why Philip’s hypervisible invisibility offers a challenge to the regimes of visibility which tend to define literary celebrity. Any account of celebrity visibility needs to recognise the fact that the implications and consequences of visibility do not sit evenly on all public persons, as the theories of Katherine McKittrick, Jenny Burman, Sarah J. Jackson, and Toni Morrison testify. Neither is celebrity visibility the dualistic, either/or proposition so frequently framed by celebrity studies: either a much-desired good (an adoring audience) or a reviled evil, as in instances of notoriety, or in cases of overly intrusive, unwanted public attention. Instead, we need to reckon seriously with the ways visibility may be both systemically denied and reimposed as oppressive hypervisibility, as I argue it is in the celebrity of Marlene NourbeSe Philip and, by extension, in that of many racialised public figures.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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 it