Writing the Outsider Within: Interned Language in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author Kerri Sakamoto can be placed in a literary genealogy of Japanese- Canadian writers who have fictionally treated the theme of the Canadian internment of Canadians of Japanese origin during the Second World War. Rather like Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, The Electrical Field gives us what has been assimilated to a language of trauma: a narrative texture seemingly embroidered around the concept of loss itself. In this article I will attempt to foreground the ways in which an attentive reading of the novel can take us from the theme of the traumatised Japanese community constrained by their memories, to the constraints imposed on the narrative form and texture themselves: from a novel about internment to a narrative of internment. In the final analysis The Electrical Field fits into the category of those Japanese-Canadian novels which the critic Gerry Turcotte has perceptively qualified as “uncanny”, in that they enable “an emblematic articulation of [Canada’s] fears about settlement, dispossession, miscegenation, and contamination”, (Turcotte 124), thus expressing Canada’s ‘foreignness’ to its own self-image.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".