Imagining London: postcolonial fiction and the transnational metropolis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
London was once the hub of an empire on which 'the sun never set.' After the second world war, as Britain withdrew from most of its colonies, the city that once possessed the world began to contain a diasporic world that was increasingly taking possession of it. Drawing on postcolonial theories - as well as interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural geography, urban theory, history, and sociology - Imagining London examines representations of the English metropolis in Canadian, West Indian, South Asian, and second-generation 'black British' novels written in the last half of the twentieth century. It analyzes the diverse ways in which London is experienced and portrayed as a transnational space by Commonwealth expatriates and migrants. As the former 'heart of empire' and a contemporary 'world city,' London metonymically represents the British Empire in two distinct ways. In the early years of decolonization, it is a primarily white city that symbolizes imperial power and history. Over time, as migrants from former colonies have 'reinvaded the centre' and changed its demographic and cultural constitution, it has come to represent empire geographically and spatially as a global microcosm. John Clement Ball examines the work of more than twenty writers, including established authors such as Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Jean Rhys, Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie, and newer voices such as Catherine Bush, David Dabydeen, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, and Zadie Smith.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
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".