The anatomy of failure: Transcolonial approaches to (not quite) decolonial past from Filinto de Barros’ Kikia Matcho to Tony Tcheka’s Quando os cravos vermelhos cruzaram o Geba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article presents a comparative reading of two books referring to Guinea-Bissau’s post-independence history: Filinto de Barros’ novel Kikia Matcho (1997) and Tony Tcheka’s sequence of four short stories Quando os cravos vermelhos cruzaram o Geba (2020). The analysis is based on the notion of transcoloniality understood here as a concept of literary criticism referring to the transformative aspect of the literary work in a society struggling to heal its wounds, achieve reconciliation, and overcome postcolonial stagnation. Across an interval of almost a quarter of a century, the two books analysed inquire about the causes of the collective and individual failure in the early postcolonial period. This generalised failure involves not only the ex-combatants of the anticolonial war, unable to rebuild their lives in peacetime, but also the next generation, grappling with circumstances such as migration and deficient education. The West African decolonial conundrum involves tribal identities at odds with the dominant postcolonial nation-building utopia and the revival of traditions at odds with modernity. Finally, in Tcheka’s approach, the vision of Africa marked by developmental impasses reaches a transcolonial stage as he gives voice to the marginalised Guinean destinies, offering a fuller account of social complexity, internal contradictions, and zones of silence.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".