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.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".