The Representation of the Car as a Social Space in Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to examine the representation of the car as a social space in Laila Halaby’s novel Once in a Promised Land (2007) and explore its interrelationship with issues of literary chronotope, counter discourse, and identity formation. The analysis of this study is interdisciplinary in nature; it tackles the car across social, psychological, and literary domains. Though the article takes Bakhtin’s theory of chronotope as a point of departure; it puts forth Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space to explicate how Halaby’s characters utilize their cars to incessantly produce social relationships with people from underclasses. In view of these two theories, it is found that Halaby transposes the semiotic function of the car, propelling it from the realm of conformity and nationalism to the realm of resistance and socialism. Halaby’s characters are depicted struggling to unshackle themselves from the stereotyping images imposed on them. By presenting the car as a medium and means for socializing with people from distinct social and ethnic backgrounds, Halaby generates a holistic humanistic narrative that deconstructs the racist and binaries thinking that pervaded the official discourse in post 9/11 America.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".