Dramatic Instabilities: Diasporic Aesthetics as a Question for and about Nation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Let’s begin with a major claim. Black Canadian theatre is forged and performed within the context of a diasporic sensibility and or consciousness. Thus, Black Canadian theatre sits somewhere between addressing its “nationally local” contexts and engaging in a much wider context: That wider context is the basis of what constitutes its diasporic aesthetics. So let’s make one further claim: Black Canadian theatre is centrally concerned with piecing together all of the ways in which diasporic expressions of Blackness can fashion a commentary on nationally local and global conditions. What I mean by this is that the form, the performance, the texture, the content, the gesture of Black Canadian theatre engages its nationally local and its wider context. In this essay I will probe a number of Black Canadian plays to demonstrate how the execution of those plays produce a diasporic sensibility and consciousness, and thus a diasporic aesthetic, and how those plays represent a dramatic instability for nationally local concerns by reaching beyond the nationally local, as well as speaking specifically and directly to the nationally local context in uncompromising fashion. The various moves or aesthetic practices that I attempt to map from these plays are what I call dramatic instabilities. These are not negative consequences of the plays; rather, they are dramatic in their demands for a more ethical constitution of the nationally local scene and of the conditions for making a life that is Black and liveable, both nationally and internationally.
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 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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".