Interculturalism Light: The Irony of Blues in <i>The Berlin Blues</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drew Hayden Taylor has been writing plays for years that use comedy and stereotypes to address intercultural issues. Taylor’s fourth play in his Blues quartet, The Berlin Blues, like the preceding three plays – The Bootlegger Blues (1991), The Baby Blues (1999) and Buz’Gem Blues (2002) – contains a thread of physical comedy, word play and revelations that coalesce around the intercultural aspects of negotiating racial divides. In his latest Blues play, we find a somewhat stereotypical German couple, bent on building their German’s fantasy theme park in Ojibway territory. Predictably, this capitalist venture is greeted in the community with both scepticism and optimism. The German’s envision “Ojibway World”(22), complete with the “Medicine Ferris Wheel,” “four directions shuttle service,” “Turtle Island Aquarium,” “Whiskeyjack Pub and Bar” and a hotel called “Haida-way” and the “Weesageechek Water Slide”(19). Considering the German couple’s predilection for indianische anything, this plot-line is to be expected. The other elements of the plot include stampeding buffalo that take revenge, a loosely developed love story and an Aboriginal man’s “buy-in” to this capitalist dream. The carnivalesque elements and the fantasy-world setting are Taylor’s attempts to transcend the normative, but unfortunately, the binaries of Aboriginal/German worked to keep this reader fixated on entrenched cultural stereotypes that lack flexibility.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".