At a Remove: The Curious State(lessness) of Migrant Mothering in Novels by Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article orchestrates a critical conversation between novels by contemporary French writers Shumona Sinha and Nathacha Appanah around the question of mothering, space, and migration. Whether mothers by choice, by default, or childless, the outwardly dissimilar women of the novels studied arrive at a shared poetic interrogation of a remove in migrant motherhood, culminating in a curious spectral statelessness. Rethinking this odd form of mothering at a distance, I identify the performance of a dispossession as both perilous and salutary. Finally, I articulate how this ghostly remove is reinscribed in Appanah’s remarks about how Sinha and she—as non-native, non-European writers of French—are disjointedly situated in French literature, which they re-imagine as a contested, stateless space for their literary expression.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".