Cold War “Cultural Safaris”: Canadian Art, Cultural Diplomacy, and the Asian Commonwealth Tour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1955, the National Gallery of Canada circulated an exhibition of Canadian art to the “Asian commonwealth”—Pakistan, India, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Developed in tandem with Canada’s involvement in the Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and Southeast Asia, the tour was part of a wide-angled strategy of cultural engagement that, despite its humanitarian trappings, was grounded in Cold War politics. Featuring a small display of relatively unimportant works in venues of limited interest to the National Gallery, the tour nonetheless marks a significant juncture in the development of the Canadian cultural state—a turning point in the relationship between the gallery and Canada’s Department of External Affairs, which in the immediate postwar decades sought to coordinate with the National Gallery in pursuit of an active role in the information brokering and cultural work it identified in the gallery’s promotion of Canadian art abroad. In this article, we position the Asian commonwealth tour as a case study that reveals the inherent tension in the relationship between the cultural and policy spheres of the state that informed Cold War mobilization of the liberal values art was thought to express.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.059 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".