Race in a “Civil” Frontier: The Chinese-Story Western of the Civil Rights Era
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today, when we think of the Western, we think of a genre dominated by white heroes conquering the obstacles of the frontier from daunting terrain to indigenous peoples. What we tend to forget – most likely because the most famous westerns did not show – is how Chinese immigrants played an important role in that history. The civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ (James Clavell, 1960) is the only high-profile western which focused on the experiences of Chinese immigrants in the west. While Hollywood films of the 1950s and 1960s all but omitted Chinese immigrants from their vision of the frontier west, almost every television western included at least one ‘Chinese-story’ episode centered on Chinese immigrants and featuring Asian American actors. The representation of Chinese immigrants was not heterogeneous nor always progressive with some television westerns recycling out-moded tropes from decades past. What made the civil rights era film ‘Walk like a Dragon’ significant and unusual, even in the midst of the Chinese-story heyday on television, was its presentation of a Chinese immigrant through the visual iconography of the white western hero as a gunslinger and romantic victor.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it