A Shoal on a New Shore: Afro-Indigeneity and Multilingualism in M. NourbeSe Philip's <i>Zong!</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the “shoal”—a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence—to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".