From Alienation to Revolution: Female Characters as Decolonial Tools in J.L. Torres’s The Accidental Native
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In J.L. Torres’s The Accidental Native (2013), Rennie moves back to his native Puerto Rico after being raised in the United States. There, he meets his true biological mother, as well as his future (female) partner. Rennie’s unawareness of his mother’s existence and Puerto Rico’s colonial situation, as well as his partner’s illness, interweave maternal and romantic love with the Island. Furthermore, their ties pre-configure the birth of Rennie’s decolonial consciousness. This analysis dialogues with representations of the United States as an oppressive patriarchal figure to the Island, its inept child, in order to incorporate and contrast the role of the mother, as well as other affective figures, within the long tradition of genealogical metaphors in the Island’s literature. A decolonial interpretation of J.L. Torres’ work proposes a familial configuration in which affective forces originating from female characters function as a tool of epistemic liberation against imperialist, colonizing, patriarchal powers, thus proposing theoretical ties between affective and decolonial studies.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".