Challenging narratives of confinement: diasporic (im)mobilities in Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s <i>In Every Mirror She’s Black</i> (2021)
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
Many literary productions of the (new) African diaspora focus on Anglo-American settings, whereas diasporic communities outside the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom are often neglected. Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström’s In Every Mirror She’s Black (2021), in contrast, centres the journeys and experiences of three Black women in Sweden to interrogate its gendered and racialised politics of migration, (social) mobility and belonging. Drawing on Levine’s notion of social structures as infrastructural, this article reads the novel through the lens of (im)mobility to illustrate how the intersection of gender, race, class, religion, nationality and legal status affects the literal and metaphoric movements of the protagonists. It thereby highlights the intricate relationship between (social) infrastructures, such as stereotypical or essentialist representations that function as “controlling images,” and the spatial and metaphoric organisation of society. In playing with and transgressing generic boundaries, moreover, the novel’s poetics reflect the fluidity and mobility inherent to narratives of migration. Through its thematic engagement as well as its poetics, the novel complicates narratives of a universal diasporic experience and thus challenges narratives of (generic) confinement.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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