Seeing with more than sight: Nalo Hopkinson's non-ocular visions of the human
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jamaican-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson has developed a substantial body of work belonging to the genre of Black Speculative Fiction. Hopkinson’s oeuvre succeeds in challenging what it means to be human. She also reminds us first that historically race has been constructed to dehumanise certain subjects. However, secondly, Hopkinson also offers possible and imagined futures in which the human subject is complicated beyond its current strictures, especially that of race. This project will argue that Hopkinson’s works often speak to philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s call to revalorize the human, a figure who is often synonymous with Man. Hopkinson’s body of work succeeds in exploring such a revalorization through one of the most prevailing sensorial faculties of human beings – our sight; a sense which has been instrumental in the identification of Blackness, and subsequently in our practices of racialisation and dehumanisation. This project aims firstly to uncover the ways Hopkinson constructs sight in multiplicitous and non-ocular ways, and secondly how this broadened definition of sight speaks to the work of Sylvia Wynter and ultimately works towards a revalorization of the human. Through a theoretical close reading of Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber, as well as the short story, “Something to Hitch Meat To”, and the comic series House of Whispers, this project suggests that when the sensorial faculty of sight incorporates non-ocular ways of seeing, this can disrupt the boundaries of the human and facilitate a revalorization, wherein racial categories no longer relegate certain subjects to subordinate social, cultural and political positions.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".