Melville and memory: Dark tourism, the carceral state, and radical pasts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The essay is mixture of first-person narrative, academic history and review, and essay-style analysis concerning the transnational elements of the Quebec separatist movement during the 1960s–1970s. The piece argues for greater attention to the dynamics of historical memory and narrative as a battleground in radical politics. It focuses on the case of Sam Melville a left-wing militant during the late 1960s who went on a bombing campaign in New York City before being imprisoned at Attica and murdered by the state during the squashing of the Attica Prison Riots in 1971. Melville, I argue, is a vanishing mediator in the story of the partnership between the Black Power insurgency in the United States and the Quebecois separatist and socialist insurgency in Canada, represented by the infrastructural bombings of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) between 1963 and 1972. Remarkably, Melville was taught how to make bombs by two Quebecois militants and fugitives who sought refuge with him in New York City through Black Panther Party connections. This story is a window into the history of transnational connections between leftwing movements during the 1960s and 1970s, but also how the security state-imposed techniques to fracture and silo narrative and historical memory.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".