Fiction as a Spider’s Web? Ananse and Gender in Karen Lord’s Speculative Folktale Redemption in Indigo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Karen Lord’s speculative folktale Redemption in Indigo (2010) engages the other-wordly or un-worldly to explore Caribbean social justice issues such as race, gender, and class inequality. Demonstrating her trickster powers, Lord merges folk gods and hero(ines) from different African traditions, for example Akan, Ashanti, Xhosa, and Karamba, with those found in Caribbean cultures. This syncretic textual strategy not only emphasizes the subversive, liminal qualities of both Ananse, the African-Caribbean folk figure, and Anansesem in challenging colonial metanarratives of time and space that have erased, denigrated, or falsely represented the African-Caribbean woman but also critiques masculinist versions of Ananse and traditionally male-dominated Anansesem. By contrast, Lord’s antipatriarchal, anticolonial account foregrounds Ananse’s feminine qualities and empowered female figures: the nonbinary storyteller, the heroine Paama, and the goddess Atabey. In doing so, Lord offers a new futuristic, feminocentric Ananse story whose weblike concentric patterns interweave the African past with the Caribbean present, the ancestral homeland with the diaspora.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".