<i>Lions Attacking a Dromedary</i>: The Verreaux brothers, imperial taxidermy, and postmortem bodily rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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".