Britain’s Imperial Past and Contemporary Borders in Adichie’s Americanah and Zadie Smith’s ‘Fences’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent literary works draw attention to the multifaceted legacy of Britain’s imperial past, not only but including its impact on current UK border practices. The works of postcolonial and Black British authors illustrate especially strongly that the spatial epistemologies of empire are still prevalent in twenty-first century border debates. This article engages with Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and Zadie Smith’s essay “Fences” (2016) as literary works that negotiate UK border practices both before and after Brexit. They draw attention to the intersections of empire, race, gender, and class in the recent resurgence of British bordering practices and emphasize the necessity to make visible both contemporary and historical borders in the UK in order to come to terms with the underlying colonial epistemologies of many border practices.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".