Niger Delta Subaltern Agency and Resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article applies the theoretical positions of some scholars from the Subaltern Studies Collective to the reading of poetry by Niger Delta writers. I argue that the Niger Delta people are subaltern in the Nigerian national space due to their disadvantaged sociopolitical position as well as the resource conflict that has left the region at the mercy of the state and its agents. With insights from the writings of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Partha Chatterjee, I read the subaltern themes of agency and resistance in Obari Gomba’s The Ascent Stone and Stephen Kekeghe’s Rumbling Sky. In adopting this framework, I draw from Guha’s original theorisation of peasant insurgency and the structure of power as well as later theorisations of relational power discourse and subaltern agency. My close reading of selected poems reveals the figure of the Niger Delta subaltern as the architect of their own destiny and whose resistance haunts the dominant discourse of the nation. The notions of insurgency, the nation and its fragments, failed revolutions, and relational power discourse are deployed as hermeneutical strategies. My adoption of this theoretical approach recovers its insights for the reading of literary works by writers from minority groups.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".