Decolonizing African and African Diasporan Cultural Memory in Djanet Sears and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Works
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article proposes to look back onto the Black Canadian works produced around the turn of the twenty-first century to establish some of the decolonial practices they promoted, arguing that they remain pivotal in decentering the colonial gaze that to this day is at the root of anti-Black hatred. In the face of continued structural violence and anti-Black racism preeminent across Canada to date, it attempts to unpack the purpose and means deployed in their early texts by two pioneer Black Canadian women writers, Djanet Sears and M. NourbeSe Philip, to decolonize African cultural memory from the diaspora by teaching us to value African legacies outside of Eurocentric standards. Drawing from feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, it contends that these texts perform a “counter-pedagogy of cruelty,” that is, an act of resistance to all those sociocultural practices by which people are taught, trained, and hardened to the ongoing commodification of others.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".