Making Political Music: Contrapuntal Constitutionalism and Indigenous-Settler Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis applies Edward Said’s thought to Canadian settler colonialism. I draw upon Said’s idea of contrapuntal reading to understand settler colonialism as an interdependent and co-constitutive relationship between domination and resistance. Contrapuntal refers to counterpoint in music, where two or more distinct melodic lines occur simultaneously. Each line is independent as a musical phrase but sounds out interdependently in the composition as a whole. I use this contrapuntal approach as a method of analysis and as the foundation for a normative practice of reimagining and rebuilding political community. Using contrapuntal analysis, I examine the installation ceremony of Mary Simon as the Governor General of Canada and the installation ceremony of Kevin Hall as the President of the University of Victoria to elucidate the limits of the foundational logic that underpins these attempts to constitute political community. I then consider potential alternative constitutional perspectives, drawn from Indigenous constitutionalisms, that resist and do not rely on settler colonial domination. Contrapuntal constitutionalism, the outline of a political practice for Indigenous-settler relations, grows out of what my analysis discloses. By extending Said’s use of counterpoint, in conjunction with Indigenous, prefigurative, and music theories, I contend with what a contrapuntal approach to anti-colonial constitutional politics could look like. The goal of this thesis is threefold: to make the case for the importance of Said’s thought to understanding the present manifestations of Canadian settler colonialism; to illuminate the dominating tendencies of Canadian political community dressed in the guise of palliative narratives of multicultural harmony; and to disclose an alternative constitutional relationship that does not further entrench domination as necessary and inevitable.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".