Transportation and <i>Agon</i> in Chinua Achebe’s <i>No Longer at Ease</i> and <i>Anthills of the Savannah</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes public transportation as a trope for networked narrative forms in two novels by Chinua Achebe: No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah. Combining insights from mobility studies with criticism on tragedy, the present article suggests that intersections of tragedy and transportation remain understudied aspects of Achebe’s fiction. While agon implies the struggle or dispute that drives literary plots in general, I argue that Achebe settles elements of the deliberative agon from classical Greek theatre within transport networks to structure agonistic exchanges amongst characters and social groups, to juxtapose forms of thinking, and to expand the idioms within his novels. As much as Achebe’s novels pivot on the experiences of singular and seemingly heroic protagonists, he is deeply invested in the relations between individuals and collectives and the representation of both in novels concerned with the problems of postcolonial nations and nation-states. As such, Achebe’s transportation systems facilitate fleeting modes of assembly for the exchange of ideas. Studying No Longer at Ease and Anthills of the Savannah together crystallizes the orchestrated and often ironic interplay between individual and collective insights. Achebe’s representations of conviviality and agonism in public transportation thus present models of thinking and feeling collectively in the novel. Moments of transportations in Achebe’s fictional worlds impart the modes of thinking animating the imagination of the nation and the machinery of the state.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".