“It’s all to do with the breath”: (Un)Sound in M. NourbeSe Philip’s “The Ga(s)p” and Zong!
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Diving into the politics of radical hospitality, the acceptance of alterity, and the erasure of black women’s bodies in “The Ga(s)p” (2018), m. NourbeSe Philip demonstrates reciprocal breath as a thread of connection that is central to human existence. Throughout this essay, Philip counters prominent, male-centric theories on receptive bodies through the emphasis on the ubiquity of contingent respiration. Philip contends that this “process of shared breath … and dependency becomes useful as a model of community and connectedness in a more female-centred, embodied symbolic universe” (36). Philip enacts this theory on the page in her book-length poem Zong! (2008). Using the court report of Gregson v. Gilbert as a source text, Zong! grapples with the November 1781 massacre of 150 Africans aboard the slave ship Zong on its passage from Ghana to England. Zong! is an erasure poem of 173 pages with movements that Philip describes as “the bones” and “the flesh.” The linguistic material of the poem and its arrangement reflect corporeality and respiration; the textual fragments are physically separated on the page—leaving room for breath. The body and breath of Zong! extends beyond the page to performance. In theory and praxis, Philip uses challenging linguistic material and arrangement to inscribe the body on the page; consequently, she causes the reader to interrogate their positionality and their relationship to the body, to language, and to performance. Keywords: erasure, erasure poetry, body, performance, breath, respiration, reciprocity, positionality
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".