The Postpostmodern Refugees, Migrants and Canadians in Sharon Bala’s <i>The Boat People</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper explores the political, ideological and social moment of Sharon Bala's debut novel The Boat People (2018) by contrasting different perspectives on personal and collective identity, with the view of answering the question of whether the novel belongs to the so-called post-postmodern poetics: a trend emerging from or evolving within the broader poetics of postmodernism.What the paper specifically focuses on is the manner in which the novel is narrated, the choice of focalizing subjects and the unsettling open-end, quite appropriate considering the relevance of the issues dealt with, all of which situate Sharon Bala's debut novel in a very specific category of literature that grants voices to those who are otherwise exploited for the endorsement of political and other agendas.Bala's characters' personal narratives reflect on Canadian multiculturalism and its intricacies, racism, xenophobia, and fundamental human needs.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".