Gerald Vizenor and Kojo Laing in Weberian Flights of Reenchantment: Ambivalent Spatial and Temporal Modernities in Ghana and White Earth
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article brings together The Trickster of Liberty by Gerald Vizenor and Woman of the Aeroplanes by B. Kojo Laing. These two novels, both published in 1988, engage in strikingly similar projects of imaginative resistance to the disenchantment of modernity, despite having originated in vastly different cultural, historical, and geopolitical contexts. Drawing on Max Weber’s account of rationalization and its attendant bureaucratic temporal and spatial logics, the article explores how both novels deploy absurdist humour, linguistic play, and narrative disjunction to re-enchant literary form and social possibility. Through communities that exist at a deliberate remove from the nation-state and characters who resist temporal linearity and spatial fixity, Laing and Vizenor articulate an “alt-modern” aesthetic: one that neither nostalgically idealizes tradition nor capitulates to modernization’s deterministic teleologies. Instead, each novelist crafts a speculative and playful futurism that destabilizes Eurocentric categories of progress and offers new possibilities for cultural survivance. By attending to the resonances between these authors without flattening their cultural particularities, this article contributes to decolonial comparative methodologies and to broader conversations about Indigenous and postcolonial literary futures.
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.
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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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 it