Marlene NourbeSe Philip's (Un)Doing of Language: Omissions, Interpolations, Critical Fabulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Starting with a reflection on the responsibility (or lack thereof) around the act of omitting, especially with reference to archival practices, this article focuses on the exploration of a series of experiments with language that the Canadian writer Marlene NourbeSe Philip carries out in her poetic intervention in the archive of transatlantic slave trade and its unspoken and unspeakable stories. Omissions appear in fact not only across and through archival sources, but also as instrumental vehicles of meaning in Philip's narrative/poetic process. This occurs in the way they work as addition rather than subtraction by providing a space for the articulation of embodied experience that the language alone is unable to convey. The article focuses more specifically on two texts: ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’, from her 1989 collection of poems She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, and the 2008 book Zong! In the exploration of both texts, the article's main aim is to highlight the way Philip literally and figuratively breaks the language and is thereby able to create new meaning. This occurs through omissions (not only historical and archival, but also textual and often achieved through deliberate fragmentation), interpolations from other textual genres and languages in the original texts, as well as the process of critical fabulation. Her way of pushing the boundaries of textuality enables not only the exposure of the violence inherent in English as a language-system and in its colonial legacy but also gives space to the expression of ‘black noise’ and its surplus of embodied experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.002 | 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".