Wagar and Motley “Archaic” Vestiges: A Postmodernist Reading of Contemporary Somali Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The advent of the modernist dream resulted in the universalisation of culture, which entails deliberate effort to abandon traditional ways of life that foster difference and instead embracing national cultures to bring different communities together. Colonialism in the Horn of Africa, for instance, brought different Cushitic communities under single political entities and most of them adopted Islam to find a common ground. Other communities in East Africa had to convert to Christianity to find a universal cultural bridge. This has resulted in the assumption that most African peoples are homogeneous given that past traditions that elevated difference have been eradicated by unifying factors such as modern states and conventional religions such as Islam and Christianity. A critical reading of some literary texts, however, demonstrates that such claims are partly unfounded because there exist aspects of pre-Islamic Somali religion along with the fundamental beliefs of Islam, which bolster difference. This article is a postmodernist reading of selected contemporary Somali fiction to investigate the influence of pre-Islamic Somali religion on contemporary Somali culture. Using the ideas of Jacques Derrida and Joseph Campbell, the study demonstrates the impact of myth and the ancient traditions on migration and contemporary culture in Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy and Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets.
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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".