The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti by Erin L. Durban (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: The following discussion of Erin L. Durban's The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti documents an "Authors Meet Readers Roundtable" session organized for the American Studies Association conference in Montreal in 2023. Originally planned for November 4, the session coincided with a local rally and march for Palestine. In solidarity, the panelists used the beginning of the slated session to create posters that included the statements "Ceasefire Now," "Professors Against Genocide," "Queer Crip Jews for a Free Palestine," "Not Another Genocide in Our Name," and "Haiti | Palestine"—linking struggles for self-determination and against occupation to mass violences and attacks on multiple freedoms of expression: the right to stay and the right to move, the right to love, the right to have autonomy over one's own body, and the right to learn and teach. We joined the collective walkout and procession through the streets, a march organized in part by the Canadian Haitian Coalition. We rescheduled the roundtable as an online event, which took place on January 26, 2024. The book discussion featured Dasha A. Chapman, Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper, Mario LaMothe, Marina Magloire, Anahi Russo Garrido, and Carly Thomsen, and was moderated by Janet Jakobsen. Durban's text serves as a foundation and touchstone for our growing Haitian studies subfield focused on gender/sexuality/queer studies. As Durban traces the long arm of empire on the formation and contestation of Haitian subjectivities and lifeworlds, the resonance of this text also extends far beyond Haiti and Haitian studies. The pieces presented here (which do not include everything that was shared during the online roundtable) demonstrate the wide-ranging implications of Durban's book. Chapman, Thomsen, Russo Garrido, and Magloire reflect on histories called forth by Durban's research, their methodological ethics, the pedagogical applicability of Durban's frameworks, and the questions the book provokes.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".