Island Studies Journal, 17(1), Book Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book seeks to take the reader on a journey to and around a variety of literary islands in contemporary literatures of the Caribbean in three different languages.It aims to explore the irreducible complexity of the island within an archipelago as a (con)figuration that oscillates between notions of isolation and connectedness.This idea of analytical island-hopping visibly underlies the structure of Graziadei's book: in lieu of an introduction it begins with a section entitled "Landungsproben", four analyses of excerpts from what the author calls "nissopoetic" texts, that allow the reader to dip a tentative toe and test the water before diving into the complex and troubled island (hi)stories the book discusses.What follows these "teasers" is the theoretical part that outlines Graziadei's approach to Antillean literature.It first provides an overview of key concepts and definitions that allow the author to chart the functions of literary islands between topos and metaphor and then introduces a range of theories on the poeiesis and poetics of islands and archipelagos.Drawing on Bnitez Rojos' concept of the self-repeating island, Brathwaites' tidalectics, Glissant's conceptions of Antillanit and Relation, as well as Monchoachi's thoughts on Caribbean creolization, Chamoiseau's approach to decolonization and Maximin's gopotique, Graziadei coins the terms "Nissopoetik" and "Archipelagik" to capture the manifold ways in which literary texts create islands as spaces of isolation and/or (g)local networks.Thus equipped, the book then launches into its exploration of Caribbean writing.The analyses are divided into three main chapters that explore different conceptions and configurations of the island in specific novels, short stories and poems.However, Graziadei explains that the reading process here need not follow the familiar linear course laid out in the table of contents; instead, at the end of each section, several different viable routes are suggested, reminiscent of the create-your-own-adventure genre which itself so often exploits the imaginative appeal of the island setting.If the reader does choose to follow the linear route, she will find that the analyses begin with rewritings of the lonely island so prominent within the colonial tradition and then move on to islands conceived increasingly as figurations of (inter)connection.The first of these analytical chapters is entitled "Ein(sam)e Insel".Patrick Chamoiseau's 2012 postcolonial take on the Robinson myth, L'empreinte Cruso, is awarded a prominent place as a powerful critique of the intertext's anthropocentric and speciesist gaze which Graziadei sees replaced here by a biocentric perspective (p.124) which fundamentally challenges the notion of the lonely island.Another subchapter looks at the continuation of the colonialist appropriation of the Caribbean through tourism in three contemporary poems: Derek Walcott's poem "The Acacia Trees", Geoffrey Philps' "Hedonist Paradise" and Oliver Senior's "Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure" all critically reflect on touristic stereotypes and heterotopias, such as the hotel complex, that continue to lock out the local population, while forcing it into their service and exploiting its culture and resources.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".