Umbilical Object and Nostalgia in Chimamanda Adichie’s <i>Americanah</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The psychological effect of migration can manifest as a feeling of homelessness, which goes beyond physical displacement to include emotional and cultural estrangement. The feeling of homelessness instigates a nostalgic yearning for home in the lives of immigrants and a longing for the familiarity of their homeland. Beyond this issue of unhomeliness and rootlessness, the psychological effect of migration also fosters resilience in the immigrant as individuals develop new coping mechanisms. Immigrants anchor on umbilical objects as a coping strategy to contain the psychological strain of migration. These umbilical objects are items, symbols, or practices, charged with significance and operate in a therapeutic and rejuvenating manner. Drawing on border theory, this study examines the experiences of immigrant characters moving across the border to foreign lands, their longing for home, and their attempts at reinvention through “umbilical objects’ as tokens of recuperation. Anchoring on Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, this paper interrogates the idea of home across borders. It explores how characters deploy umbilical objects to reinvent home in spaces of foreignness. Ultimately, this paper argues for the enduring significance of home and symbols of home in shaping the lives of immigrants.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".