Self-Effacing Whiteness and Its Surrogation in Southerne’s <i>Oroonoko</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I read Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko to reveal moments of reciprocal establishment of Blackness and whiteness through the racializing proximities and orientations around bodies within the play as well as between the play and the Restoration audience. In tracing the formal, epidermal, and thematic changes that accompany the adaptation, we see the emergence of what I call a ‘self-effacing whiteness’ that forgets itself in its own process of establishment. Here, whiteness acts not just to forget what it erases but also to forget itself as a racialized perpetrator. Reading the process of racialization in Oroonoko: A Tragedy phenomenologically through Sara Ahmed, I read the changes that accompany this cultural recreation as what Joseph Roach calls ‘surrogation’. Ultimately, this article achieves the two pronged end of identifying attempts at racial fixity, as well as revealing the self-effacing nature of whiteness emerging in the eighteenth century.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".