Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times: Rawi Hage's Cockroach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The precarity and vulnerability of refugees have contributed to the rise of populist discourses of fear that prompt aversion to, and therefore the abjection of, displaced people, namely refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants. This situation not only diminishes them as human beings but also excludes them from the social, political, and economic system of the countries where they seek refuge. This article offers an analysis of Rawi Hage’s 2008 novel Cockroach, focusing on the resilience of destitute migrants and their resistance to adapt to the demands of the hegemonic discourse of multiculturalism in Canada. The novel’s protagonist metaphorically transforms himself into a cockroach in an attempt to subvert a neoliberal regime that construes him—and others like him—as passive, vulnerable or dangerous. This article suggests that the novel challenges the dominant and optimistic understanding of resilience, and points to an alternative understanding of the concept based on the experience of refugees.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".