Selvon’s Bush Coolie: Producing Backwardness in “Cane is Bitter” and The Plains of Caroni
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on Lisa Lowe’s and Radhika Mongia’s studies of the intertwinement of liberalism and indentureship, I argue that Selvon’s “Cane is Bitter” and The Plains of Caroni extend the liberal narrative of modern progress. In both texts, Selvon valorizes the modern East Indian’s choice to forget all that is associated with the village in order to pursue self-realization in the city. Selvon does so, however, by conjuring the bush coolie, the backward East Indian of the village against whom the modern East Indian is defined. Selvon’s dependence on this figure negates the value of a sociological reading of both texts. Instead, “Cane is Bitter” and The Plains of Caroni allow for an examination of the production of difference within post-indentureship portrayals of East Indians. I consider the implications of Selvon’s emphasis on consent, ethical individualism, and geographical distinction, and I argue that Selvon’s affirmation of the future of the modern East Indian necessitates his production of those unfit for that future.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".