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Record W4401075393 · doi:10.5206/mfds-ecfw.v9i1.19232

William Apess’s Christian Postcolonialism: A Response to Lahontan

2024· article· en· W4401075393 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Frederick J. Karem

Bibliographic record

VenueLe Monde français du dix-huitième siècle · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicChristian Theology and Mission
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPostcolonialism (international relations)SociologyHistoryArtGender studies

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The essay by Fredrick J. Karem, Professor of English and Africana Studies, positions the indigenous writer William Apess (sometimes spelled Apes) as a contributor to a dialogue started by Lahontan and carried forward by many Euro-American writers. While there is no definitive evidence of his having read Lahontan directly, Apess’s writings show that he is participating in an extended dialogue assessing the culture and values of Native Americans in contrast with those of their European colonizers. A reading of Apess in the context of Lahontan is warranted both by historical context and the critical significance of his writings, which abound with references, quotes, and citations from a veritable library of 18th and 19th century authors, many of whom were familiar with either Lahontan or Rousseau. This essay argues that Apess’s writing provides a perspective that echoes, extends, and critically revises Lahontan’s work. Long before the term “reverse anthropology” was coined, Apess reversed the colonial gaze to offer an indigenous perspective upon the customs, habit, and frailties of the white man. His writings reflect to his white readers an image of their culture, particularly the sins that they cannot or will not see. For readers of Lahontan, much of this discourse is reminiscent of his dialogues with his fictional Huron friend, Adario. With that said, Apess’s essay has a broader set of cultural claims than Lahontan’s work. Notably, Apess is one of the first authors (if not the first author) to note the common threads of domination practiced by white men throughout the world. Specifically, he demonstrates how the displacement and confinement of Native Americans, enslavement of Africans, and colonizing of people of color form a consistent, systematic pattern of exploitation that belies the promises of so-called European civilization. Unlike Lahontan, Apess grounds his critique in both New Testament values and apocalyptic judgment. Because of his strong religious orientation, combined with his global perspective, this essay frames Apess as a Christian postcolonialist, a critic who builds upon Lahontan’s discourse even as he extends and transforms it in key respects.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.640
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.003

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.220
Teacher spread0.210 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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