Liminality and Longing in Zora Neale Hurston’s <i>Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”</i> and Dionne Brand’s <i>At the Full and Change of the Moon</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) and At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Zora Neale Hurston and Dionne Brand, two prominent African diasporic writers, pen narratives in which they centralize the challenges ingrained in the in-between spaces Black people occupy at the nexus of slavery and freedom. Through Hurston’s non-fiction narrative and Brand’s fictional narrative, they offer us important stories in which two African-descended men, Kossola and Kamena, bravely inhabit that nexus and willfully forge a space in which they assert and pursue their versions of freedom and fulfillment despite the tragedies and longing that haunt them. In Barracoon and At the Full and Change of the Moon, both authors document how persistent freedom quests and insistence on retaining and passing remembrances serve as forms of resistance to consumption by this liminal space. In both texts, then, Hurston and Brand provide us with important African diasporic narratives about the continuity of survival, resilience, and empowerment in the face of tremendous adversity.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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 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".