Refusing the Fictions of Unmarked Whiteness: Challenging Human Rank, Race, and History
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2017 inauguration of a statue in Lisbon, Portugal, to the seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in colonial Brazil, Father António Vieira, offers an opportunity to discuss history writing as a narrative genre. The statue epitomizes the naturalization of Portugal’s imperial narrative genres of history writing, instantiating their recapitulation into the future. Vieira’s statue exposes how colonial mythologies constitute a narrative of power premised on the erasure of colonial resistance. These dynamics, I argue, are intrinsic to the history of history writing. They arch back to a panegyric tradition of narrating the past that emerged in the eighteenth century in the Portuguese Royal Academy of History. Confronting eighteenth-century fictions demands exposing the epistemic whiteness undergirding Western exercises of recovery of the past and narrating history. Focusing on History as a genre, and its attending exercises of curatorial knowledge-production, exposes the deliberate erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other historically marginalized agents of anti-colonial resistance.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".