The Animal Other: Revisiting Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story’s Jerry and Peter from a Postcolonial Lens
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper delves into the intricate layers of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story (1958), with Jerry embodying the other and Peter representing the self. The focus is on the rich and complex postcolonial issues of hybrid identity, land, art, and otherness. The fixed identities of Jerry and Peter serve as a lens to understand the dynamics between the self and the other, where every other is shaped by the conquering culture while rejecting its ability to define it. Otherness is a complex and multifaceted concept involving discourse and the dominant group's norms and ideals. To maintain their feeling of superiority, Westerners stigmatized groups such as Others, Barbarians, Savages, and People of Color throughout the colonial era. The conflict is perpetuated through stereotyped ideals and spatial structure. The paper employs the Manichean allegory, the fragmented family metaphor, and the Native American trickster figure to delve into otherness and becoming an animal in the Third Space, Central Park, a unique blend of wilderness and modern life. The sudden appearance of the trickster Jerry in the northern part of the park, leading to a fatal fight for the bench, will expose invisible crimes rooted in animality, sexuality, and criminality discourses of identity-making. Albee's narrative will bring Editor Peter to the shaman's path through tribal storytelling and murder, a powerful tool for promoting sensation for diversity in media, forcing Peter to confront his other and self as the colonizer, colonized, and the animal via the face of the dying animal, Jerry, impossible to deface.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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".