The postcolonial world as a cargo globe: ideas of inequality in early Ghanaian fiction, 1968–1977
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reconstructing the thinking on inequality of Ghanaian writers-cum-intellectuals Ama Ata Aidoo and Ayi Kwei Armah, this article contributes to the burgeoning research on inequality in literature and to global and African intellectual history. While both authors have mainly been studied by literary scholars, little work has been done to focus explicitly on their ideas about global inequality. This article investigates how ideas of inequality and concepts of an unequal world figure in the writers’ early fictional works and unfolds how these authors were influenced by their trajectories within transatlantic intellectual networks, including key inequality thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney. In their early novels, both writers reactivated the enslaved figure to counter the widespread rhetoric of emancipation of the early independence period, articulating neo-colonial critiques based on an anachronistic use of slavery-related metaphors and conceptions of the postcolonial world as a “cargo globe.”
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".