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Record W4415717375 · doi:10.1017/9781009662376.003

The Colonial Archive

2025· book-chapter· W4415717375 on OpenAlexaff
Neil ten Kortenaar

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAsian American and Pacific Histories
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsColonialismRelation (database)Meaning (existential)Trope (literature)HonorOrder (exchange)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

If, as Roberto González Echevarría argues, all fiction is written in relation to the archive, African literature is written with an eye to the colonial archive. That archive reflected an imperial will to knowledge and was an information system collected in an attempt to define and so control Africans. Writers such as Achebe, Tutuola, La Guma, and Coetzee have imagined it as a prison, as hell, or as a great maw. The meaning of the colonial archive changed as it receded into the past. African writers seek to supplement the archive in order to correct it (Sleigh, Gappah, D. Diop); resurrect those suffocated in it (Achebe, Christiansë); find ancestors (Krog, Joubert); escape the archive’s surveillance by imagining an outside (Brink, Coetzee, Gordimer); or honor the dead (Samkange, Djebar). African literature resists and subverts the archive but is also haunted by it. The colonial archive is itself now a trope shared among African writers (Achebe and Adichie), becoming an element in the archive of African literature.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.039
Threshold uncertainty score0.130

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0070.007
Scholarly communication0.0140.008
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0390.009

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.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.215
Teacher spread0.201 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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