A Double Take on Debt: Reparations Claims and Regimes of Visibility in a Politics of Refusal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes that the concept of “odious debt” provides an especially fruitful legal framework for the Haitian and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) demands for reparations and debt severance. The concept renders visible different dimensions of the background economic order that have been constitutive of postcolonial sovereignty, and the histories of trade and aid that have engendered debt. In analyzing the work of different regimes of visibility, I have found it useful to think with Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 film Bamako, and the world of Wakanda in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018)—two films that work through the stakes of visibility, recognition, and refusal in the society of nations. Visibility—both as a metaphor for what is explicit and an account of what is before our eyes—is central to the politics of reparations. In this context, the doctrine of “odious debt” and the cinematic considerations that frame, advance, and interrupt the narrative worlds of Bamako and Wakanda provide an interpretive lens through which to make visible the background structural arrangements linking globalisation’s winners and losers, and concomitantly, to contribute to situating reparations in a politics of refusal. The reparation claims of Haiti and CARICOM can be understood as stories entailing law and economics, visibility, and witnessing of the world—stories with a performative function where the telling itself seeks to interrupt how the world functions.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".