Cultural Bastards: Caribbean-Canadian Humor in Shani Mootoo's Out on Main Street
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wife battering and murdering, prostitution and suicide have long been hushed incidences that nevertheless have finally been addressed by some Indo-Caribbean writers, one of which is the Canada-based artist and writer Shani Mootoo. In her novels Cereus Blooms at Night, He Drown She in the Sea, and Valmiki’s Daughter, her poetry collection The Predicament of Or, and her short story collection Out on Main Street, Mootoo picks up the culturally specific ways of inscribing a culture of violence and shame onto Indo-Caribbean female sexual identities in ways that Mehta has described as being "associated with a series of taboos and restrictions imposed by male-ordered strategies of confinement and inhibition" (192). Even while living in Canada, Mootoo exemplifies Mehta's claim that Indo-Caribbean women find it difficult to free themselves – and the works they produce – from the haunting national and diasporic legacies of repression and invisibility. A reading of Mootoo's work as an example of the interlacing of sexuality and diasporic Caribbean identity reveals that a reconfiguration of "home" in terms of optional exile does not erase one's innate ethics, but actually magnifies them, since diasporic communities like the Indo-Caribbean tend to maintain their "cultural identity through migrating notions of gender-role conformity" (Mehta 209). "Shut your arse up, before it have trouble between we in this street." (V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street)
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".