Out of Place, Out of Control: Transgression in Pearl Cleage’s <i>Bourbon at the Border</i> and <i>Flyin’ West</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pearl Cleage (1948–), a self-identified Black nationalist and radical feminist, uses her plays to investigate the role of place in the Black experience. This article focuses on Bourbon at the Border (1997) and Flyin’ West (1992) to examine Cleage’s idea of Black geography through transgressions of spatial boundaries and the law. By considering the presentation of crime in both plays as ultimately constituting spatial acts, this article scrutinizes the main characters’ geographical movement and asserts the significant role of place in the social construction of criminality. In the end, both plays reveal that transgression aims for utopia, an imagined place; therefore, even though transgression is a symbol of resistance, it works only temporarily and as a limited tactical choice. Cleage’s Black theatre thus uses themes of crime and violence to highlight the profound sorrow of the African diaspora. This interpretation emphasizes the value of her understanding of racial issues related to place, and it offers a unique perspective that contrasts with analyses that often overlook these dimensions.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".