Bibliographic record
Abstract
Precarious Passages investigates how one type of cultural production, fiction written in English, participates in the ongoing construction of black diasporic identity within the old Anglophone African diaspora in the Western world. Because the dispersed communities of the African diaspora are not united around any shared religion, secular culture in its various forms plays a major role in producing and reproducing the African diasporic imaginary—that is, in creating symbolic communities and in keeping alive the sense that there is something that can be called a black diasporic community and something that can be called a black diasporic identity, however nonprescriptively defined. Precarious Passages analyzes eleven novels of movement and migration written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African Caribbean descent (Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat), reading these texts as cultural mediators of black diasporic memory and as active participants in the formation of black diasporic identity. In the process, Precarious Passages advances our understanding of current black Anglophone diasporic fiction by placing novels usually classified as “African American,” “black Canadian,” “black British,” or “postcolonial African Caribbean” in dialogue with each other. Works falling into these categories are traditionally read, interpreted, and anthologized separately, but Precarious Passages shows that the concept and empirical reality of the African diaspora facilitates an integrative approach to the black Atlantic literary imagination.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.113 | 0.034 |
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".