In “An Anonymous Elsewhere”: An Exploration of Identities in the Postcolonial Spaces of Kim Thúy’s Mãn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“If you want to survive, get rid of your identity”. From then on, Mãn and her Maman came to a resolution. In this violent state, they “learned above all was how to become flexible, imperceptible, invisible even”. The event when these words were spoken, would come to mark a significant turn not just in the history of Vietnam but the legacy of the postcolonial state. Be it, the state of origin to the land of settlement, the militant surge by the Communist army to the Québécois under the perceptual threat to its French identity, the cities of Saigon and Montreal surrounding the spaces of the text, remain imperceptible well within their legacy of imperial centres and their evolution into metropolitans through modernity principles. What else keeps disappearing in the narrative, along with the identities, are the places and their sign of times. It is because the places and the times feared “the unknown and, even more, the known” in their forms of state-based conflict. Along with examining a scholarly turn in the space discourse, prudently brought by movement and scepticism of the place-identity, the tangents of spatial identities are explored. A ‘symbolic’ space forms, invisible and unaccounted for, as one’s sense of self resigns from the markers of time and place entrenched in instability and postcolonial violence. Kim Thúy’s Mãn, breaking away from an inherent sense of place, exists in spaces created and intendedly disassociated from the temporal and historical complexities of either her home or the host nation. However, identity is an occurrence weaving itself from the frayed fabric of state and sociality. The current study examines the turfs of postcolonial spaces and formation of identity in Kim Thúy’s Mãn, lending the nature of space, a look through the lenses of spatial socialisation, place-identity and the transnation. Keywords: Space, Mobility, Migrant Identity, Quebecois Nationalism
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.036 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".