“Terrestrial Verses” on the borderline: an interdisciplinary decolonial reading of Forugh Farrokhzad and Frida Kahlo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article studies the social and historical underpinnings of Forugh Farrokhzad’s poem “Terrestrial Verses” (1962) and her documentary film The House is Black (1962) in light of Frida Kahlo’s painting, Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States (1932). I argue that this unlikely comparison—between neocolonial Mexico and postcolonial Iran—helps articulate a decolonial paradigm in Farrokhzad’s poetry that is often subdued in Persian literary studies. Few scholars have approached Frida Kahlo and Forugh Farrokhzad’s works from a post- or decolonial point of view, and almost no one has compared these two artists. Nevertheless, hitherto unseen aspects of their work address their politics, sense of worldliness, visions of decolonization, and dismantling of the colonial residues in their respective cultural contexts through their art and artistic expressions. In terms of Farrokhzad’s poetry, the history of medicine and public health in Iran is of high importance as I make my case. This interdisciplinary and comparative reading results in a new understanding of the epidemic of leprosy as an unintended consequence of the “colonial matrix of power” in Iran during WWI.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".