Imperialist Conditions of Genocide: On Positioning Postcolonial African Genocide within the Broader Field of Genocide Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper addresses the following question: How should we position specific examples of genocide within the broader field of genocide studies? In responding to this question, the paper reflects on the significance —particularly pedagogical significance—of “postcolonial” African genocides. I provide some provisional considerations about this significance based on my teaching of African genocides in a genocide and literature course at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. As I elaborate subsequently, the literary/cultural texts of postcolonial African genocide that I find valuable for my classes contextualize African and other genocides in historical and ongoing conditions of imperialism. By embedding occurrences of genocide in Africa within a broader violent history of imperialism, they mobilize a relational understanding of genocide by insisting on the traumatic linkages of genocides in Africa to genocides and mass atrocities elsewhere. These works consolidate thinking about genocides (especially since the dawn of Atlantic Slavery) less as disparate, separate events but instead as entangled in an expansive history of imperialism.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.078 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| 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".