Creative Spatializations: New Cartographies in Contemporary Black Canadian Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My dissertation explores the ways in which contemporary black Canadian novels rewrite national space by integrating into it what might be called past and present black spatialities. Regardless of its official policy of multiculturalism, Canada appears unable to reflect the diversity of its population, one of the most multi-ethnic in the world, which results in the social and spatial exclusion of minorities—whose presence is perpetually construed as ‘recent’—from the dominant national narratives. Starting from Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “[a] social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space” (54), and from the conceptualization of fictional literature as both a product and a producer of geographical creativities, this work considers the literary respatializations of black Canada in five recent novels, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and What We All Long For (2005) by Dionne Brand, Any Known Blood (1997) and The Book of Negroes (2007) by Lawrence Hill, and Soucouyant (2007) by David Chariandy. I specifically examine four topographies through which these writers relate ‘blackness’ to ‘Canadianness,’ namely, the ocean, the city, the rural suburb, and the home space. More specifically, this dissertation illuminates how these literary representations of Canadian space locate this nation within the paradigmatic locations of black history but also show how the country’s social and geographical landscape is marked by the black history that took place in the country itself. Through a multidisciplinary approach which looks at theorizations of space emanating from literary, geographical, and sociological fields of study, I examine how these writers shift the terms of Canadian identity by disrupting the founding narratives of the nation which rely on the country’s wild landscapes and construct Canada as a white-only space. Finally, this dissertation engages with racialized bodies whose interconnectedness with both physical and imaginary spaces allow for a multiplicity of creative spatializations to emerge.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.038 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".