Embracing Im/possibility: A Black Feminist Exploration of \nTau Lewis’ T.A.U.B.I.S. (2020)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the paradox of what it means to live Blackness within a world founded upon its destruction through a critical art historical analysis of Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis’ exhibition Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls (T.A.U.B.I.S.) (2020). Adopting a Black feminist framework rooted in methods of opacity, I interrogate the racist visual, cultural, and social economies that have continuously objectified and dehumanized Black people since the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, I illuminate how Lewis’ work navigates structures of anti-Black violence and reimagines Black diasporic life beyond white supremacist patriarchal capitalist impositions of negation. Drawing from Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman’s notion of the afterlife of slavery, I establish Lewis’ work within a larger legacy of Black diasporic practices of Black refusal, care, relation, and radical imagination that grapples towards liberatory ends. At the same time, I consider how T.A.U.B.I.S.’ interdisciplinary nature—which includes poetry, speculative fiction, and hand-sewn textile sculptures which represent imagined Black motherly ancestors—emerges as an expansive site of Black diasporic possibility that transcends reductive constructs of biological determinism. Ultimately, this thesis argues that with T.A.U.B.I.S., Lewis not only tends to present-day Black diasporic subjectivities, but further prompts vital strategies for knowing and living Blackness otherwise in the still unfolding aftermaths of slavery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".