Entangled representations of Brazil and Canada: towards a decolonial intervention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is a cultural studies intervention that offers a critical framework for interrogating fictional narratives in which parts of the story take place in both Brazil and Canada. Through close textual readings, thematic and contextual analyses of nine texts from different genres, languages, and national origins, this thesis demonstrates the challenges and the opportunities for a more nuanced view of what I call entangled representations of Brazil and Canada, and their hemispheric implications. After arguing that stereotyping and language barriers contribute to framing polarized views of Brazil and Canada, while also marginalizing both countries in the imaginaries of the Americas, I draw on Donna J. Haraway’s theorizations about kinship and response-ability to suggest ethical readings of those entanglements. The first chapter examines the Hollywood blockbuster The Incredible Hulk and Margaret Atwood’s novel MaddAddam to problematize the tradition of depicting spaces in Brazil and Canada as no man’s lands where people vanish from society. The second chapter expands the linguistic scope of this project by focusing on the Brazilian novela O Dono do Mundo and Sergio Kokis’s Québécois novel Le Pavillon des Miroirs to highlight the importance of both multilingualism and translation in bringing Brazil and Canada together. The third chapter explores the performative potential of kinship in offering a multilayered view of the Americas through case studies of Nancy Huston’s novel Black Dance and Tomson Highway’s play The (Post) Mistress. The fourth chapter looks at Lesley Krueger’s novel Drink the Sky and Vandana Singh’s novella Entanglement to demonstrate the role of response-ability in building ethical views of transnational entanglements. In dialogue with Guillermo Verdecchia’s play Fronteras Americanas, the conclusion makes the case for shifting the geographies of knowledge that have dominated the field of hemispheric studies. As an invitation to care about the ways Brazil and Canada are brought together in fiction, this thesis ultimately unveils what is at stake in those entangled representations, as well as new possibilities for thinking about the American hemisphere.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".