Going Nowhere: Oceanic Im/Mobilities in North American Refugee Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In philosophy and theory, the terms flight and territorialization are tightly connected to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Through “lines of flight”—unpredictable routes defying spatial control—they conceptualize the breakup of a hegemonic spatial semantics through the mobility of the nomad. These lines make the paths of “deterritorialization,” contravening normative spatial structures (“striated” space) and producing “smooth space” that escapes structuration and control. Postcolonial critics such as Gayatri Spivak have held Deleuzian philosophy accountable for reaffirming a universal (white male) subject, but rarely debate lines of flight and deterritorialization, which appear somewhat romantic if applied to refugees subjected to involuntarily deterritorialization. In my essay, I ask how literature can perform the work of a conceptual corrective to such blind spots by reading Edwidge Danticat’s 1991 short story “Children of the Sea” and the novel Dogs at the Perimeter by the Chinese-Malaysian Canadian Madeleine Thien (2011). Danticat’s story focuses on the Haitian “boat people” that attempted to reach Florida shores in the 1980s and 1990s, while Thien examines the Cambodian genocide and its consequences for the children that came to Canada as refugees. Both texts, I argue, articulate what Achille Mbembe has called the necropolitics of genocide and demographic control and perform a grueling critique of the necropolitical structures that continue to produce transoceanic death.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".