Vanishing: Freedom, erasure and transcendence in Black magical realist art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the transformative power of ‘vanishing’ in Black magical realist art, focusing on artists who reframe and critically engage with erasure, displacement and misrepresentation to critique colonial legacies and racial oppression. By examining works by Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Alberta Whittle, John Akomfrah, Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke and others, the article highlights how Black artists use magical realism to confront and reimagine histories of displacement and invisibility. The trope of vanishing, often seen as erasure, is reframed as a pathway to freedom from oppressive narratives and the colonial gaze. Through speculative fiction, art and theory, this study investigates how artists subvert racialized visibility, offering new forms of liberation, transcendence and counter-hegemonic discourse.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".