Mental Illness as Cultural Narrative: Dementia, Im/migrant Experience and InterAmerican Entanglements in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article discusses David Chariandy’s novel Soucouyant (2007) in the context of critical disability studies and hemispheric American studies. In particular, it explores dementia as a cultural narrative that links the protagonist’s personal case of dementia to her traumatic experiences of US violence, abuse, and exploitation in the Caribbean, her forced migration in Trinidad, and unfulfilled hopes of integration into Canadian society after having immigrated in the context of Canadian labor and immigration programs in the early 1960s. The article explores the various levels of meaning dementia unfolds in Chariandy’s novel as critical reflection on memory work, racism, and colonial as well as neocolonial exploitation. It also relates the narrative structure of the novel to recent geriatric life-telling therapy used to restore individual dignity and identity to people suffering from dementia.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| 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".