Of Zombies, AIDS, and 'Africa': Non‐Western Disease and the 'Raciocultural' Imagination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay investigates the “raciocultural”—a term designating the slippage between, and mutual construction of, “race” and “culture” within discourses of quasi‐biological determinism—as a means of exploring Western representations of non‐Western disease as “foreign” threats to Europe and North America. It suggests that the raciocultural is at once a colonial‐era construction and a reflection of contemporary trends that have seen racist discourse become increasingly displaced onto the notion of the “cultural.” Investigating a range of texts including news media, literary texts, and interactive entertainment, the essay focuses on representations of “African” space as biologically and culturally “infected” in order to examine the spatial dimensions of the raciocultural. The essay concludes by interrogating the present lack of postcolonial literary‐and cultural‐studies engagements with the institutional contexts of medicine, arguing that the readings presented here demonstrate the importance of such analysis.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".