Care and Liberation in the Black Anthropocenes: apocalypse, justice and family abolition in N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves series
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cherie Dimaline’s Marrow Thieves series (2017-2021) and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017) are examples of speculative fiction that interweave post-apocalyptic settings with issues of racial, social and climate (in)justice. Dimaline’s work is a Young Adult dystopian series in which the Indigenous people of Canada are hunted for their bone marrow, which is employed to cure settlers from a madness-inducing incapacity to dream, resulting from the effects of climate collapse and capitalism. Jemisin’s novels are a speculative fiction series set in a world besieged by earthquakes, whose planetary predicament is connected to the ongoing oppression of marginalized groups. Both writers explore worlds in which the vulnerability of oppressed racialized people is inseparable from a proximity with, and an intimacy with, ecological devastation, staging speculative versions of what Kathryn Yusoff has called, in reference to real-world contexts, Black Anthropocenes. Since both series connect the project of ending the Black Anthropocenes with kinship and family, while being fully aware that kinship/familial formations can either be revolutionary or reinforcing systems of oppression, I read both through the concept of family abolition, understood as finding alternatives to the hegemonic institution of the family while dismantling the hierarchies, systems and uneven power relations it helps to defend. Relying on family-abolitionists like Sophie Lewis, Brigitte Vassallo and others, I explore, through Jemisin, how relations of care, liberation and autonomy can be revolutionary antidotes to kinship relations of ownership; and, through Dimaline, how the nuclear family (and the nation) entails a logic of sacrificial otherness.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".