Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines representations of debt and obligation in works of Caribbean Canadian literature published between 1997 and 2007. It uses these representations to discuss the relationship between postcolonial, global, and diasporic approaches to cultural studies. These disciplinary distinctions draw explicit and implicit divisions between the colonial, the postcolonial, and the transnational as discrete historical moments in a teleologic progression. Against such divisions, literary works by David Chariandy, Ramabai Espinet, Dionne Brand, and Nalo Hopkinson suggest that colonial pasts do not remain in the past but continue to overdetermine the ‘transnational’ present. Intriguingly, each of these authors uses the language of debt and obligation to describe these temporal and geographical entanglements. This thesis draws on new economic criticism, memory studies, theories of recognition, treaty citizenship, and Afro-pessimism to argue firstly that Caribbean Canadian literature’s representations of debt refute emerging neo-Marxist theories of debt’s governmentality offered in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and secondly, that they expose diaspora studies’ underlying valuation of individual autonomy and possessive individualism. By representing colonial pasts as outstanding and unpayable debts, fictional and nonfictional works dispute the seemingly clean breaks contemporary scholarship and political debates can draw between colonial pasts and transnational futures. Debt, at its simplest, is any exchange not brought to completion; Canada’s present is a space of incomplete—and incompletable—cultural, economic, and intellectual exchanges. Bookkeeping: Discourses of Debt in Caribbean Canadian Literature offers an anti-colonial critique of the transnational present and asks what it means to live ethically amid the colonial aftermath’s systemic debts as they entangle past and future, nations and diasporas, bodies and archives, as well as political emancipation and consumer agency.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".