Can I Get a Witness? Performing Community in African-Nova Scotian Theatre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha reminds us of the extent to which ambivalence “haunts the idea of the nation,” fracturing efforts to imagine unity and coherence, so that narratives of nation remain partial and incomplete (1). Alan Filewod echoes and extends this idea in his claim that “Canadian theatre can as a whole be considered as a meta-performance that enacts crises of nationhood” (xvii). If those crises of nationhood may be understood to include the place of racialized and sexualized “others” in the nation and the place of the “regional” within an imagined national culture, then African-Nova Scotian theatre enacts the ambivalence, the crises of nation(hood) of which Bhabha and Filewod speak. In fact, many African-Nova Scotian plays intervene in what Bhabha terms “those justifications of modernity — progress, homogeneity, cultural organicism, the deep nation, the long past — that rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’ tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic prerogative” (4). In part, this intervention is made through an abiding concern with history in the work of playwrights as diverse as George Elliott Clarke, George Boyd, Walter Borden, DavidWoods, Louise Delisle and Lucky Campbell, who cover the spectrum from professional theatre to the grassroots. But whether the play has a historical or contemporary focus, the interventions these plays make in the ways Canada is imagined are enabled by a performative structure of witnessing that forges a politically alternative community at the scene of the performance.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".