Colonial Archives in Austin Clarke’s <i>The Polished Hoe</i>: In and on the Body of Mary-Mathilda
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores narratives of sexual violence, commodification, and objectification of the Black female body in the patriarchal context through the intersectionality of the vectors of race, class, and gender. The notion of performativity is central to this context. This article addresses the way that, in Austin Clarke’s novel The Polished Hoe, Mary-Mathilda assumes radical agency by resisting sexual victimization and reaches a complex understanding of the self by occupying various subject positions simultaneously: that of the field labourer, of the mother, of the mistress, of the sex worker, and of the murderer. A lot of emphasis has been placed on the dialectic of trauma inflicted on the Caribbean community, but little attention has been given to the attainment of Black female radical agency. I explore the question of positionality within the structure of a power hierarchy in a specific geographical space through phenomenology. This theory will shed light on the complexity of sexual relations in that system. Mary-Mathilda is a liminal subject whose transition to agency is marked by the spatiality of the plantation and by the temporality of the night. I argue that she falls into a third identitarian space. This new space is a discursive formation that functions as a locus where multiple subjectivities exist and where the subject can exist in its most authentic form in a cross-cultural framework similar to the one outlined by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic. By employing the term “third identitarian space,” I provide a fresh outlook in relation to the spatial dimension of the work of Frantz Fanon. The existence of a third identitarian space signals the existence of a third space of thinking, a way of thinking that deviates from the dialectical thought of postcolonial theorists who recognize this space only in relation to the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. Ultimately, through her final act of mutilating Bellfeels, Mary-Mathilda rewrites the fabric of patriarchy.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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 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".