Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (2014), Americans in Waiting (2006), many influential articles on immigration and citizenship, and he is a co-author of the law school casebook, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. He has testified in Congress and served on the ABA Commission on Immigration. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Motomura applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borders and Belonging is part of Chapter Six, which addresses a key question in immigration debates: what about people without lawful status? The focus is the United States, but the discussion offers lessons for analogous debates worldwide. Chapter 6 as a whole explains why the best approach is legalization – that is, offering lawful status based on some conditions. Page 99 digs into a specific problem with legalization – that one-time legalization will do nothing to prevent the emergence of a new population of people without lawful status. Page 99 explains that one way to anticipate and address this problem is to have some sort of periodic legalization, but then I turn to the limits of this approach.

A reader who looks at page 99 will get a good glimpse of the book, but just a glimpse. Let me first explain what makes the glimpse a good one. Page 99 shows that the book is about immigration policy, and that it grapples with one of the topic’s most contentious issues, legalization (or amnesty). Page 99 also shows that the book takes on some of the conventional wisdoms shared by legalization’s proponents. In particular, page 99 expresses skepticism about the potential of legalization as a durable solution. So page 99 is like many pages in all chapters in two ways. First, page 99 delves deeper than the usual arguments. Second, it emphasizes how responsible approaches to immigration require broadening the time horizon to include both a long-term view and mustering the patience to put farsightedness into practice.

Why, then, would readers get only a limited view of Borders and Belonging by reading page 99? I wrote the book because I’ve learned, over several decades in this field, that almost all writing and thinking about immigration policy is too narrow. People with views or research on immigration often don’t see refugees as their topic. Lawyers don’t consider the work of international development economists. Immigrants’ rights activists may dismiss the concerns of Americans who feel displaced by immigration and immigrants. Borders and Belonging adopts a much broader perspective that includes issues that are rarely addressed together and yet are interwoven in reality.

So chapter 6 is about people without lawful status, but chapter 1 asks a very different question: “why national borders, and why not?” Chapter 9 examines a topic often raised but less often examined: “what does it mean to address migration’s root causes”? Chapter 10 discusses the relevance of history to the making of immigration policy today. In short, page 99 may give the impression that the book is about people without lawful status, when in fact the book weaves that topic into a complex set of interlocking questions. The answers try to be faithful to the book’s subtitle. And so the book is: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (2022).

Robbins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, and reported the following:

Well gosh! In my case the Ford Madox Ford test seems to have worked pretty well. Page 99 of Atrocity: A Literary History offers evidence from the nineteenth century to back up two key arguments of the book, both of them liable to be controversial: 1) that while racism or ethnocentrism certainly made it easier in the past for people to commit atrocities against Others or foreigners, there are plenty of atrocities in which racism was not a cause at all, indeed had nothing to do with the capacity to slaughter noncombatants, and 2) that while we think of white European populations in modern times as full of enthusiasm for atrocities committed by their armies against people of color, there have always been some (not necessarily anti-imperialist) who were horrified both by the violence and by the lies told to justify it. So-- this goes to the argument of the book as a whole--I contend that humanity does have a significant moral history, a progressive history, and this in spite of the terrible, terrible atrocities committed in modern times, atrocities (think of both the Holocaust and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023) that have made modern times seem the most violent times of all.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Abigail Ocobock is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships, and reported the following:

Page 99 launches browsers into the middle of a chapter about a group of LGBTQ+ people I call “Marriage Assumers.” The previous two chapters examine two other groups - “Marriage Embracers” and “Marriage Rejecters.” Taken together, these chapters explore variations in the marital orientations of different kinds of LGBTQ+ people.

Page 99 conveniently offers readers a brief summary of what they have already learnt about Marriage Assumers thus far in the chapter. Asking them to “pause and imagine the average Marriage Assumer for a minute,” it directs readers to imagine the following kind of LGBTQ+ person:

She came out and started dating same-sex partners after legal marriage was already possible. She always assumed that she would get legally married one day. Knowing that her relationships have marriage potential matters to her, and she has vetted her partners for marriage interest and commitment early on, making it a deal-breaker. She does not know exactly why marriage is so important to her. Instead, she feels it is “just what you do” when you love someone and are committed to them. She also wants children, and she feels strongly (but rather abstractly) that marriage is important for having them. She has been lucky enough to find a partner who feels the same way.

Having reiterated central features of a “Marriage Assumer,” page 99 then guides readers to focus on the topic of a new section on “Marital Readiness” by asking: “But how does she know when it is the right time to get married?”

By the end of the page, I have set the scene for answering that question, but have not yet delved into the data that does so. I explain that although Marriage Assumers needed to know that marriage was “on the table” from the beginning, it was usually only the front end of their relationships that progressed very quickly toward marriage, then their relationships slowed down (something I later refer to as “locking it down, then slowing it down” – p.101). Marriage Assumers moved quickly from meeting to dating and moving in together, in an effort to ensure a commitment that could put them on the track toward marriage, but then wanted to take their time to achieve particular relationship and life attributes deemed necessary for marital readiness. Marriage was regarded as the crowning achievement of their relationships; it was something they were consciously working toward, but would not rush into.

Browsers would get only a partial idea of the whole work from page 99. They would gain a general sense that it examines how LGBTQ+ people think about and do marriage. Yet relationship trajectories and “marital readiness” represent just one small part of that larger story.

Because page 99 conveniently summarizes how “Marriage Assumers” think about marriage, readers would accurately glean the way marriage is taken for granted by LGBTQ+ people who formed serious relationships after same-sex marriage was already legal, and the extent to which marriage defines their relationships. And if one had to pick a group to narrow in on, Marriage Assumers perhaps make most sense. Now marriage is legal nationwide, all LGBTQ+ people start their relationships with the option to legally marry.

But it is only by comparing across groups that readers gain important insights about the transformative impact of legal marriage on LGBTQ+ lives. Browsers might be left with an impression that same-sex relationships today are fairly indistinguishable from heterosexual ones. But they may not realize that this represents a significant transformation in same-sex relationships. And they will not understand what has been gained and lost with that change. Notably, at the very top of page 99 a run-on sentence from the previous page emphasizes “the central role that access to legal marriage plays in shifting ideas about marriage and parenting across generations.” The rest of page 99 quickly moves on to a new sub-section, but I hope a savvy reader might be alerted to ponder social change.

What I would want readers to know, that might not be possible from page 99 alone, is that Marriage Material is not just about same-sex marriage. I use the case of same-sex marriage to advance understanding of the enduring and changing meaning of marriage as an institution. I challenge the prevailing narrative in family sociology that marriage is a fundamentally weakened institution, showing how it continues to shape individual choices and behaviors in profound ways. I illustrate how marriage operates, shedding light on a variety of institutional mechanisms that work independently and in tandem for different people. Overall, I contend that marriage has had a transformative power on same-sex relationships—one that is much stronger than the power of LGBTQ+ individuals to change the meaning and practice of marriage.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Mann's "You Are My Sunshine"

Robert Mann is the author of ten books on U.S. and Louisiana political history. He was a senior aide to US senators Russell Long and John Breaux and Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. A professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University, Mann held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song, and reported the following:

Page 99 of You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song does not give the reader much insight into the history of the iconic song in my book’s subtitle. This page is devoted to Davis’s transformation from country singer to gospel music entertainer in the early 1950s, four years after the conclusion of his first term as Louisiana governor.

[Davis] surely noticed that other country artists were releasing more gospel songs. Popular acts like the Bailes Brothers and Molly O’Day had made gospel records since the late 1940s. Davis’s label, Decca, had inaugurated a “Faith Series” in March 1950 featuring gospel recordings by its top stars, including the Andrews Sisters, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley. Foley’s 1950 recording of the gospel standard “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” was a top-ten country hit in July 1950. In February 1951, Eddy Arnold’s “May The Good Lord Bless and Keep You” for RCA Victor reached number five on the country chart. And that summer, Foley released another gospel single, Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace In The Valley.” It became the first million-selling gospel record. It’s unclear how much these hits influenced Davis, but by 1951, he had gone all in. He would record almost nothing but gospel music for the next two decades. It was a brilliant decision that kept his career alive. Within a few years, as rock and roll exploded in popularity, most of the top country stars of the 1940s and early 1950s saw their careers decline. But, because he had already migrated into a new genre, Davis’s career survived and thrived.

Not only were his audiences ready for this new, dignified, upright Jimmie Davis, but his voice was well-suited for gospel. On the first recordings with the Anita Kerr Singers, Davis’s voice was pure and smooth, with a revitalized, heartfelt quality. Perhaps it was the new sparer instrumentation. Or maybe it was the support of masterful backup singers. Whatever the case, it was a fresh and appealing sound.

In re-launching his career as a singer of sacred songs, Davis was also a trailblazer. There were few major solo artists in Southern gospel. When Davis entered the field, singing groups— mostly quartets—dominated the genre. They roamed the South, performing in churches and other venues. Among the most prominent were The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Speer Family, The Blackwoods, The Statesmen, and The Sunshine Boys Quartet. For Davis, the new emphasis on gospel music boosted his waning career. The decision came with a ready audience that had followed him for years and loved gospel music as much or more than they loved country music. Those already toiling in the southern gospel field regarded his advent not as threatening competition but as an enormous compliment. “The gospel music industry profited during the 1950s from a genuine celebrity in its midst,” James R. Goff Jr. wrote of Davis in Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel.

When I began working on this book, I set out to explore the background of Louisiana’s state song, a simple lullaby that I thought Jimmie Davis wrote. At the time, I had no idea I would chronicle four decades of Louisiana political history and as many years of country music history, all through the lens of this iconic song.

Here's the book’s bottom line: Davis didn’t write “Sunshine,” but the song was the foundation of his remarkable political career as well as vital to the growth and respectability of hillbilly music, what we now know as country music. “Sunshine” and other seminal hillbilly songs helped give the nascent musical genre respectability by crossing over into popular music when stars like Bing Crosby and other non-hillbilly artists recorded them in the early and mid-1940s. It was one of the main reasons for Davis's induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1972.

“Sunshine” was also vital to Davis’s political success in the 1940s and 1960s. It helped him become Louisiana’s governor twice. That’s because “Sunshine” and other hit songs like it allowed him to overcome and obscure the fact that he had made a series of bawdy Blues records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those songs -- with names like “Bed Bug Blues,” “High Behind Blues,” “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” and “She’s a Hum Dum Dinger from Dingersville” -- threatened to derail his embryonic political career. But the wholesomeness of his popular, trademark song overwhelmed all that and blunted his opponents’ attacks.

Although he didn’t write “Sunshine,” it’s impossible to appreciate the song’s cultural and political significance unless you understand Davis, his personality, artistry, and long and colorful political career.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's "Making the Human"

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is located in the early pages of chapter four, which focuses on public discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to anti-Asian racism. Global catastrophes like pandemics often create a widespread sense of public panic and uncertainty. They shake social senses of security and normalcy, and as a result, not only do scientists search for solutions but a number of public narratives emerge to make sense of them as well. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the U.S. witnessed the overtly racist narrative that Asian and Asian American communities were to blame for spreading the virus, as well as public criticism that the U.S. was handling the pandemic like a “Third World country” or “failed state.” While criticism of the U.S. pandemic response is certainly warranted, this particular comparison nevertheless illustrated that the pandemic had scandalized a widespread public assumption: that “First World” nations like the U.S. are immune to these devastating disease and viral outbreaks, often imagined to be confined to faraway Asian and African countries. Page 99 discusses how these narratives function, illustrating how many public discourses around COVID-19 attempted to make sense of its social and geopolitical significance in ways that were highly racialized. Page 99 situates these narratives in larger histories and scholarship on pandemic narratives. It also argues that as public narratives attempted to make sense of COVID-19 as an imperceptible virus that moves seamlessly through human carriers, they targeted Asian and Asian American people (and their environments, such as the commentary on wet markets) as embodiments of the virus itself. As the page argues, this narrative “manages anxieties about a ‘leaking’ Third World or threatened U.S. geopolitical dominance. By associating the virus with Asian/Americans, U.S. public discourses can replace an unlocatable and unstable anxiety with a definitive object- the virus can be given a cause, blame can be assigned, and Asian/Americans can stand in as symbolic embodiments of COVID-19 itself.” (99)

Although not a perfect representation of the book in its entirety, page 99 does touch on a key idea that brings it together: racial allegory. Making the Human theorizes racial allegory as the way that media, institutional, and cultural discourses narratively mobilize Asian American difference to naturalize a limited understanding of what it means to be human. The book addresses a range of contexts and sources across law, media, and popular culture, so a reader opening the book to page 99 wouldn’t know that the book also considers narratives of “justice” and “meritocracy” in the recent SCOTUS battle over affirmative action in chapter three, or that chapter two talks about gendered representations of Asian American families and mothering in popular film. Nevertheless, they would see the larger concept of racial allegory at play, namely in the discussion of how pandemic narratives are as much about power as they are about health. Making the Human is interested in how Asian Americans appear as key narrative figures in the stories we tell about social phenomena, including COVID-19: what are Asian Americans doing in these stories, and what do they represent? What value judgements do these stories use Asian Americans to imply, and what hierarchies do they implicitly normalize as a result? In the case of COVID-19, Asian Americans are framed as disease-ridden carriers, as conspiratorial agents of the Chinese nation state, as the specter of a supposedly backwards “Third World,” as indicators of U.S. national decline, and more. All of these stories are doing work: to shore up U.S. exceptionalism, to stoke fears of a geopolitically powerful Chinese nation-state, to resecure the boundaries of the (white) national body, and so forth. Other chapters focus on different narratives: for example, how the SCOTUS battle over affirmative action cast Asian Americans as studious, innocent, and victimized citizens, which then did the work of reframing age-old anti- Black backlash to affirmative action in the supposedly “anti-racist” language of defending Asian Americans. So, like the other chapters, this chapter illustrates that it is not only important to name a narrative as a racist stereotype, but also to understand what symbolic and material work that narrative is doing to normalize (or challenge) larger hierarchies.”

Visit Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "American Eldercide"

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including Agewise, Aged by Culture, and Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe. She is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Gullette applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It, and reported the following:

American Eldercide concerns a dreadful failure of social justice in the COVID Era. It starts as an investigation of how the Trump administration, Congress, and the states abandoned the 1,400,000 residents of nursing facilities early in the Era. People who happened to be living in those government-supervised facilities were twenty-six times more likely to die than the rest of us.

Many were exposed to the virus when they could have been protected. Discarded as if they were expendable. Dependent on authorities who seemed distant or witless. Unable to get away to greater safety. Often dying alone. Yet saving them would have been doable: There were only 1.4 million of them. And they were resilient, not at all ready to die. The catastrophe was due not to the residents’ “biology” but to the well-known, ongoing failures of the public-health system.

Books about COVID ignore or slight these indigent people, mostly women, most on Medicaid, often disabled. This book, fueled by righteous anger, has to explain how they came to be ignored and, by now, forgotten. Americans were trained to accept a terrifying, widespread new form of ageist ableism, that youth would survive, but another falsely homogeneous category called “The Old” would die. Neither stereotype was empirically true, but a panicky, distracted, misled, self-absorbed, and fearful society had some reasons to think so. Page 99, as continued on page 100, works well to present one of the key reasons.

.... Overriding distinctions of age, race, and class, transcending the surges and lulls, another number, growing only in one fierce and fatal direction, mesmerized the population: [the total number of American deaths.]. Thinking about death could be forced on anyone, daily. A writer in the Boston Globe condensed common impressions from that period:

It’s hard to remember a year when death was so in your face from morning to night—from pages of obituaries in the morning paper to the nightly news with its images of mobile morgues parked outside overwhelmed hospitals and cemetery workers burying bodies as fast as possible with few mourners present. [top p. 100]: As early as July 2020, a new statistic circulated, that 80 percent of the US dead were over the age of sixty-five. The headline “1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished” appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2021. The early blare of announcements that residents composed 40 percent of the dead, and in some states over half, was overshadowed. . . . Residents had made up only 0.42 percent of the population. Everyone over sixty-five constituted 16 percent.

Receiving less attention, the residents’ dire conditions may have caused less concern or regret. The most succinct definition of “the expendables” I have found is “people whose disappearance wouldn’t draw attention.” With the onset of a more encompassing dread, that small hapless group was exiled, farther still, from the social embrace.

American Eldercide closely studies a historical moment, the new COVID Era, that was full of unnoticed crises. In this tightly structured book, many themes and feelings from these two pages recur: the role of the media, the misuse of statistics, the fear that is called mortality salience, the mass-mind created by fear, the psychology of divergent groups within that mass.

The previous chapter, “The Hidden Truths of a Corrupt World,” details Trump’s narcissistic ageism and reveals how his administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid carefully disguised malfeasance.

American Eldercide is also full of antidotes to such strange, grim material: reliable facts and warmer ways to feel; policy proposals for reforming the system from public-health experts, and life-saving rules from the Biden administration. The real embrace of justice can come only from anti-ageism--a powerful intersection of feminism, anti-racism, disability activism, progressive theory, and responsible caring.

Learn more about American Eldercide at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America.

The Page 99 Test: Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger Chickering's "The German Empire, 1871–1918"

Roger Chickering is Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University. His publications include The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) and Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2014).

Chickering applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The German Empire, 1871–1918, and reported the following:

Browsers who crack open this book on page 99 will encounter the revival of Catholic piety in German Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, which culminated during the militant pontificate of Pius IX (1846-78). These developments set the backdrop for the Kulturkampf, the famous “culture war” between the confessions during the first years of the German Empire. This passage does not do well on the Page 99 Test; but I hope this result does not speak to the quality of the whole. The passage presents only an early hint of the broader problems that inform the book.

The third chapter, of which the passage is part, introduces one of several central themes that give shape to the work as a whole. To put the matter in musical terms, the book is designed a little like a fugue, in which the principal themes are introduced early, then developed in their interplay in the body of the work. The main themes are confession (Catholic and Protestant), social class, and regional tension between rural and urban Germany. Along with several other motifs—gender and ethnicity (including the “Jewish problem”)—they are analyzed together as the bases of pervasive sectoral strife in Imperial Germany. The book attends to the organization and mobilization of domestic conflict, political interaction among sectoral groups, questions of integration and national unity, colonialism and foreign policy, and finally the Great War of 1914-18, in which the German Empire perished amid domestic discord—with terrible consequences. The book offers a comprehensive history of the German Empire, a contribution to debates that have raged among historians of Germany for the past seventy years.

Learn more about The German Empire, 1871–1918 at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie J. Preston's "Complicit Participation"

Carrie J. Preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the founding Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching.

Preston applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Complicit Participation appears early in Chapter 4 and describes the history of blackface minstrelsy that informs George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921, and All That Followed (2016), the main focus of the chapter. This history is also important to the performance genealogy of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959) and its revival at The Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2003 – the topic of Chapter 1 – and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s radical adaptation An Octoroon (2014) – Chapters 2 and 3. From 1830 through the Harlem Renaissance, blackface minstrelsy and later derivatives like jazz, tap dancing, and ragtime were tremendously popular entertainments. They represented an ambivalent fascination with the Black male body and featured cross-gender costumes, dancing, music, and short skits. Page 99 starts the story of the supposed invention of blackface minstrelsy when T. D. Rice overheard the song of a Black stage-driver in Cincinnati singing “Jump Jim Crow.” The section ends with the argument that blackface minstrelsy is more complicated than we tend to assume, especially when the popular press associates minstrelsy with the emergence of offensive pictures of political leaders dressed in blackface in their youth. Minstrelsy was undeniably constructed for racist pleasure, particularly to serve as a pressure valve to relieve competition over jobs. It was also understood, by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, among others, as having the potential to perform new racial identities and cultivate an audience to appreciate them. Minstrelsy was not simply racist or antiracist, but like so many cultural products, much more complicated.

Readers picking up my book to learn about allyship and audience participation in contemporary theaters of racial justice would probably be surprised to turn to page 99 and find a history of 19th century minstrelsy. In that sense, the Page 99 Test would not introduce the browser to the main concern of my book. At the same time, I am very interested in the longer histories of racial performance that inform contemporary theaters, particularly minstrelsy and melodrama. My book is also particularly committed to the principle that understanding the complexity of historical performance helps us understand our current moment – in relation to theater and activism more generally. I give the Page 99 Test a 5 (out of 10) for my book.

I wrote much of this book during what felt to me like the dark days of the first administration of Donald Trump, never imagining that it would appear in the shadow of his second, nonconsecutive term as president. Much has not changed. I still believe that complicit participation is the prevailing framework through which many white liberals who identify as allies participate in theatrical and other institutional efforts grouped under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote the book to improve efforts for racial justice, not undermine them. Yet, in this moment, it can feel like there is no room for critiques of allyship from allies themselves, critiques from within. Today, I would emphasize most that allyship cannot be an individual practice but must involve communities in solidarity, resisting oppression and injustice wherever it emerges.

Learn more about Complicit Participation at the Oxford University Press website

--Marshal Zeringue

George González's "The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism"

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture at The CUNY Graduate Center and at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

González applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance initiates reflection upon an ethnographic scene that opens Chapter 3, which itself serves as a bridge between the two main sections of the book, Act I, which foregrounds the intellectual and political stakes of the relationships between our mode of consumption and climate catastrophe, and Act II, which centers the life and activism of the New York City-based anti-consumerist and “Earth Justice”-grounded radical performance community, The Stop Shopping Church (aka Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping). In short, reading page 99 would serve the prospective reader of the book well by situating them at an important thematic and analytical crossroads.

Chapter 3 begins with a description of one of the group’s street actions at the turn of the millennium: a small group from the ‘Church,’ led by Reverend Billy, a then parodic performance character developed by William Talen, a musician and actor, processes down the Times Square neighborhood toward the flagship Disney Store carrying two crucified oversized Mickey and Minnie Mouse plush dolls (‘fetishes’) on long sticks. Dressed as a combination of 1980s-style televangelist and Elvis, Reverend Billy preaches that Mickey Mouse is the antichrist. The action is designed to protest the Disney brand’s role in the commodification of sentiment and memory, its gentrification of the theater district, and its exploitation of global sweatshop labor.

Page 99 introduces two key considerations. The first is the historicity of the Marxian “commmodity fetishism.” As it turns out, the very idea of the fetish was born of transcultural encounters between sixteenth and seventeenth century Iberian traders and West African counterparts and reflects the values of the European racial chain of being. The second key consideration introduced on page 99 is Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that capitalism can be understood to be a “religiously conditioned construction” or an “essentially religious phenomenon” in its own right.

Bringing the work of the Stop Shopping Church into conversation with religious studies, performance studies, critical theory, sociology and anthropology, the ethnographic core of the book describes the ways in which the Stop Shopping Church has traditionally deployed the signifiers of American religion to mark and critique the co-constitutions of Evangelical Protestantism and neoliberal capitalism (consumerism as religiously constructed) as well as its organizing social function as religion (consumerism as essentially religious phenomenon). The book describes and analyzes the ways in which the originally parodic Stop Shopping Church has come to function as (in the group’s own words) a “post-religious religious” community grounded in green values and how and why the critique of the fetish (the finger wagging of ‘put down that Mickey Mouse doll!’) has, under the leadership of co-founders William Talen and Savitri D, transformed into a much more radical and capacious political ecology that takes direct critical aim at the ways in which the effects of ritualized consumption boomerang back at us in the form of extreme weather, species extinction, and deadly toxins taking up residence in human bodies (consumer capitalism as systemic ‘Shopocalypse’).

Visit George González's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salma Monani's "Indigenous Ecocinema"

Salma Monani is a professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She has extensively published in ecocinema studies, Indigenous ecomedia, and environmental justice. She is co-editor of four ecocritical media anthologies. As part of her College’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, she also engages in public eco-humanities along with community research with Indigenous partners.

Monani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Despite its time-consuming nature, Calder often works independently on her projects. Her decision to work without large crews is deliberate. First, she finds that the process allows her to more easily experience the relational spaces of her stories--“I often think of it as I'm going to the forest today, or I am being confined in that little room, as in Snip.” Second, she rejects the production norms of mainstream animation that employ an estranged Taylorized model of production. Such a model is geared to capitalist efficiency, often churning out films with such slick production that Calder notes they “feel like a roller coaster ride; I’m buckled in, it’s a dynamic thrill.” In contrast, Calder’s low-budget, individually created films are aimed to help audiences “feel” the labor and materials that are so often invisible in mainstream animation’s immersive projects (think Disney, in particular). While Disney might acknowledge some of its high-profile animators (e.g., in “how the film was made” extras), these acknowledgments tend to glamorize the process and hide systems that continue to perpetuate fleshy and earthly violence through problematic labor and environmental practices. For example, Hollywood productions often outsource labor to countries where working conditions are worse than those in home countries; the impacts are felt at home too where workers are laid off…

… Calder refuses to partake in these discriminatory systems. Despite knowing that her production choices might disadvantage her in terms of how quickly she can make a film, she would rather situate her filmmaking within a work ethic that is relationally bound—to her Indigenous communities and the decolonial and ecological messages she presents onscreen. In other words, much like Monnet, Calder is acutely attentive both to how she encodes Indigenous cinema time(s) onscreen and to how she grounds her production in material practices that honor Native being in time as relational processes of living ethically and in kinship with the human and more-than-human world.

The excerpt from page 99 works well to provide a partial snapshot of the book’s goals as it draws attention to the ecological dimensions of one Indigenous filmmaker, stop-motion animator Terril Calder (Métis)’ cinema practices. In the book, I argue that we can learn a lot about a) how cinema—its onscreen messages as well as its off-screen production, reception and distribution practices—are enmeshed in environmental contexts, and b) how contemporary Indigenous cinema helps us re-evaluate these enmeshments with an eye to social and environmental justice. Essentially, a goal of Indigenous Ecocinema is to bring ecocritical attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive, and simultaneously, another goal is to bring, Indigenous intellectual voices front and center into (eco)cinema conversations. Interlacing these two goals, the book offers d-ecocinema criticism, a methodological approach that invites Indigenous (and, thus relatedly, decolonial) frames to our understandings of cinema’s ecological entanglements.

In this excerpt, Calder reflects on her cinema, comparing it to the practices of mainstream animation cinema industries. In discussing her process of working independently, despite the time it takes, Calder helps direct our attention to the environmental and social justice implications of cinema production. At the end of the excerpt, I mention another filmmaker (Caroline Monnet, an Anishinaabe/French experimental artist) whose work is also ethically oriented to ecosocial justice. Throughout the book, I showcase film creatives who challenge the business-as-usual modes of cinema industries and instead engage in cinema practices that engage land and community responsibilities, on and off screen.

Not surprisingly, it would be a lot to ask one page of the book to best capture Indigenous Ecocinema’s broader goal to offer the methodological approach of d-ecocinema criticism. The page definitely implies this goal as I foreground Calder’s insights as essential to my analyses. However, this excerpt does not demonstrate how extensively I draw on Indigenous intellectual thought and scholarship to expand the current purview of (eco)critical cinema theory and practice. To engage with this broader goal, I invite you to read the book, which explores three essential ingredients of cinema worlds—place, time, and feelings. Spotlighting these three components, the book reads Indigenous cinema as d-ecocinema (with attention to decolonial and ecological frames of reference) and offers cinema aficionados and scholars alike a roadmap to re-orient away from current business-as-usual extractive and exploitative media environments.

Learn more about Indigenous Ecocinema at the West Virginia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue