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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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".