The Politics and Poetics of Thomas King’s Textual Hauntings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the use of the Indian ghost motif in Thomas King’s writings within the framework of postcolonial criticism about spectral narrativity, and in the light of both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. King outlines a politics and poetics of haunting that wholly contradicts Canada’s alleged ghostlessness, as expressed not only by pioneer Catharine Parr Traill in her famous 1833 statement about the complete banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’, but also by Earle Birney, who concluded his poem ‘Can. Lit.’ asserting: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’.Unlike other instances of the genre, King’s textual hauntings are never horrific because the presence of spectral Native figures in his novels and short stories does not include any malevolent or macabre elements. Yet the subversive humor which often pervades these mysterious appearances and other fantastic manifestations in King’s poignant scenes of magic realism becomes an amazingly effective strategy to revise colonial history and raise important issues concerning the present day lives of Natives in North America, such as stereotyping, cultural appropriation and commodification, sovereignty, environmental degradation and territorial claims.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".