Diasporic Anxiety in The Last Gift: Dual Nature and Emotional Community Formation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the dual nature of anxiety among diasporic subjects in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s The Last Gift. It first identifies anxiety as a product of racial conflict, class oppression, identity disorientation, and generational divides—laying bare its roots. Second, it analyzes how this anxiety is suppressed through the formation of a “Community of Silence” among diasporic groups. Third, it foregrounds anxiety’s role as a catalyst for shattering silence, rekindling emotional bonds, and ultimately transforming individual distress into collective experience. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theory of negative affect, this study interprets the metaphor of the “gift” in Abbas’s final deathbed recordings to trace this three-stage trajectory of anxiety. It argues that anxiety, far from being purely destructive, facilitates inter-generational and intercultural emotional connections, enabling diasporic subjects to construct emotional communities rooted in shared affective struggles. This process challenges conventional academic framings of “negative affects” and offers a narrative paradigm for resisting structural oppression in the globalized era—one that resonates with Gurnah’s critique of colonial history and his empathetic portrayal of refugee experiences.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".