Can the West Speak? (Picturing the Quilting Point in Cambodian and Palestinian Films)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the unraveling of subjectivity under conditions of imperial and genocidal trauma. It does so by staging encounters between critical race theory, psychoanalytic and post/colonial approaches through a transnational Asian consideration of Cambodian and Palestinian documentary films made by Rithy Panh, Raed Andoni and Kamal Aljafari. In particular I consider the psychical-philosophical dimensions of picturing the unspeakable effects of war and genocide, both in terms of Global South filmmakers and participants, as well as theoretical audiences, especially via the notion of unraveling as it relates to Jacques Lacan’s concept of “the quilting point”, wherein signification is forged. Representations of trauma, particularly genocide, do not suture the spectator to an imaginary world, as per traditional psychoanalytic film theory; rather, they unquilt at its site/sight, leaving the spectator in a psychotic limbo. Finally, this article reworks Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by analyzing the political and phantasmatic structures sustaining the west’s silence about Israel’s genocidal campaign in Palestine.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".