Species Metaphors and Biopolitics in Contemporary Novels of Forced Migration
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On the populist front the language and imagery used for migrants reinforce the perception of them as trespassers and criminals, implying fears of their appearance in large numbers or as lone wolf terrorists. The German right-wing party AfD compares the recent appearance of wolves on German soil with what it perceives as trespassing migrants; Trump used to refer to migrants from the global South as “animals”, labelling them as “predators and invaders infesting America”; David Cameron famously invoked the images of biblical locust infestations by comparing migrants with “swarms of people coming across the Mediterranean”; and UK media pundit Katie Hopkins compared migrants with “feral humans” and “cockroaches”. It is a rhetoric that has become an integral part of what Fintan O’Toole has described as the “new pre-rather than old post-fascist” political climate. In my essay I will discuss three contemporary novels, Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River (2018), Norbert Scheuer’s Winterbienen (Winter Bees, 2019), and Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008) to demonstrate how these authors instrumentalize three species metaphors – wolves, bees, and cockroaches – for a literary representation of forced migration. Their works show us how fluid such metaphors are and how these authors reconfigure three species metaphors and redeem them from former cultural and political representations.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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 it