Transgenerational Colonial Trauma and Disordered Eating in the Work of Maaza Mengiste and Igiaba Scego
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay analyzes how Ethiopian American Maaza Mengiste’s novel Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2010) and Somali Italian Igiaba Scego’s memoir La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I Am, 2010) represent transgenerational colonial trauma through their female protagonists’ relationships to food. Employing Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of transgenerational haunting, the corporeal transmission of Italian colonial trauma is explored. To supplement classic trauma theory, the work of Afrofeminist scholars who posit the importance of intersubjectivity in approaches to trauma is employed. The essay thus explores how these two literary texts render the legacy of colonial violence visceral through an emphasis on the body, the process of transforming somatic symptoms into narrative, and the necessity of community building to working through generational trauma. In their contribution to the formation of a transnational collective memory of Italian colonialism in Ethiopia and Somalia, the texts invite the reader to consider their position in relation to this trauma.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".