Chris Foss's "The Importance of Being Different"

Chris Foss is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington and co-editor of the 2016 essay collection Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives.

He applied "the Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Importance of Being Different: Disability in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, with the following results:

The Good Soldier is one of my all-time favorite novels, so I was really hoping to be able to fall in with Ford on this, but in general I would have to say that the Test does not work particularly well with my book. My page 99 is the second page in the fourth and final content chapter, which offers a close reading of Wilde’s famous fairy tale “The Happy Prince.” This page consists primarily of the chapter’s second paragraph (framed by the last 7 ½ lines of the opening paragraph and the first 4 lines of the third paragraph). This 24 ½-line paragraph exclusively serves as a summary of a critical essay written by Julia Miele Rodas on the character of Bertha Plummer from Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth, so there is no mention of Wilde or his fairy tales anywhere in this paragraph. It does serve as a hat tip to one of the book’s features, which is that all six chapters contain their own different Dickensian connection, each briefly relating some aspect of my take on that chapter’s Wilde work to a new Dickens novel, but if readers were to go by page 99 and the sheer number of its lines devoted to Dickens, they could not be blamed for assuming this is yet another book on Boz.

That being said, there are some snippets from the partial paragraphs that do provide a snapshot of the book’s concern with Wilde’s fairy tale. The end of the first one acknowledges the tension in “The Happy Prince” between the era’s more typical renderings of disability as a form of martyrdom and the story’s disability-aligned protagonist who stands out as an agential provider of succor who slots into the role of benefactor rather than recipient of such aid. The start of the third paragraph then raises the important issue of Wilde’s relation to the peculiar protagonists he features in these texts and the extent to which he is self-consciously spoofing sentimentality and/or more earnestly engaging in a form of utopian re-visioning of the importance of being different.

Learn more about The Importance of Being Different at the University of Virginia Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pancho McFarland's "Food Autonomy in Chicago"

Pancho McFarland is a professor of sociology at Chicago State University. His latest work includes the coedited volume, Mexican-Origin Food, Foodways and Social Movements; Toward a Chican@ Hip Hop Anti-Colonialism; The Chican@ Hip Hop Nation: Politics of a New Millennial Mestizaje; and Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio. Since 2008, he has worked in the decolonial food movement as executive director of the Green Lots Project. He is a certified permaculture designer and became director of The Permaculture Institute of Chicago in 2020.

McFarland applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Food Autonomy in Chicago, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Food Autonomy in Chicago is from the chapter, “Learning from the Land: CommUnity Pedagogy in Place.” This chapter describes pedagogical approaches used by members of the sector of the Black food autonomy movement of which I have been a part for the past 18 years. The discussion about the land as teacher found on page 99 extends from the previous page:

The students not only learn about the historical genius of African, Indigenous, and diasporic foodways but also how to employ this genius in their own lives. In Indigenous food systems throughout the world complementary planting is used as a technique to improve plant growth, resist disease and pests, and develop soil. ‘Las tres madres’ teach students a practical lesson they can employ in their plots as well as further illustrate the genius of Indigenous people. Along with teaching complementarity, soil conservation, and polyculturalism, las tres madres teach survival, subsistence, and spirit…Through touching the seeds and lovingly tending them, we learn the deep lessons of reciprocity that they teach. We see how they provide a model for human relationships and the values of respect and interdependence central to Indigenous social organization. We see how the uniqueness of each is nurtured when they grow together. The mothers teach us that life requires diversity to thrive as their yields increase in direct proportion to their cooperation.

Page 99 is a good place to land if you want to get a general understanding of the book. It captures a lot about what the book is about. The browser will read words like Indigenous, Indigenous Knowledge, land as teacher, reciprocity, responsibility, in lak’ ech, and maiz narratives. Thus, The Page 99 Test is a generally good ‘browser’s shortcut.’ However, it misses a few things that might mislead the reader who happens upon this page. You won’t read about important concerns of the book such as Black American traditions and identity, Indigenous/Black anarchism, gender and race. The browser might miss that the book is an analysis of a primarily Black food movement in Chicago.

The book is an autoethnographic account of my work and that of my camaradas. Primary amongst our concerns is teaching Indigenous (including African and Black American) lifeways in our movement spaces especially gardens and small farms. We have developed a set of ever-evolving pedagogical practices that center elders and the land as our primary teachers. I call these practices CommUnity Pedagogy. This discussion of how ‘las tres madres’ (corn, beans and squash) teach with the assistance of the ‘fourth mother’ (or gardener) is a great example of all that we try to do in this movement; teach sustainability, reindigenize our identities and practices, solve food and health related problems, resist current systemic abuses to Black, Indigenous and other people of color, and work collectively to create a new world. This discussion provides the reader with a glimpse of how we creatively imagine and cultivate a “world in which all worlds fit” using Indigenous Knowledge modified to take on contemporary challenges, technologies and circumstances.

Learn more about Food Autonomy in Chicago at the University of Georgia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steve Gowler's "Thoughts that Burned"

Steve Gowler is Chester D. Tripp Chair in Humanities Emeritus, Berea College, where he taught from 1993 to 2024. His articles on nineteenth-century religious thought and literature have appeared in the New England Quarterly, Church History, the Anglican Theological Review, and Southern Humanities Review.

Gowler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thoughts That Burned: William Goodell, Human Rights, and the Abolition of American Slavery, and reported the following:

Readers dropping into Thoughts that Burned on page 99 find themselves amid revolutionary ferment in Rhode Island in 1841-42. The Dorr Rebellion pitted Charterists, who supported only modest changes to the state’s Royal Charter of 1663, which allowed only propertied white men to vote, against Dorrites (named for their leader, Thomas Wilson Dorr) who pushed for a new constitution that would expand the franchise to landless merchants and mechanics. A former resident of Providence, RI, and a proponent of radical democracy, the abolitionist William Goodell, the subject of Thoughts that Burned, followed the events in Rhode Island avidly. He instinctively supported the Dorrites, though he lamented their refusal to extend the vote to Black men. When he visited Providence in the late spring of 1842 the air was charged with the threat of violence.

From page 99:

As usual, Goodell’s pen was at the ready. He wrote an article for Joshua Leavitt’s Emancipator and Free American, titled “Lessons of a Single Day, or Sketches and Musings of Twenty-Four Hours in Rhode Island,” which focused on the Charterists’ bad faith in denying the natural rights of most of Rhode Island’s population. Over the next several months, Goodell continued to reflect on the implications of Dorr’s push toward a more democratic polity for his state. In the fall, Goodell published The Rights and the Wrongs of Rhode Island, arguing that the Rhode Island Charter contradicted the United States Constitution and proclaiming that the Declaration of Independence was the “grand expositor and father of Constitutional law.” This claim that the Declaration is the hermeneutical key to the Constitution would be crucial to the legal arguments he developed in the coming years.

This passage mentions Goodell’s signal contribution to the abolitionist movement: his radical antislavery reading of the U.S. Constitution. Along with Gerrit Smith, Lysander Spooner, Alvan Stewart, and, most famously, Frederick Douglass, he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the Rosetta Stone of constitutional interpretation, the lens through which the Constitution was revealed to be, in Douglass’s words, “a glorious liberty document.” Douglass credited Goodell with being one of the most important influences on his understanding of the Constitution and his conversion to political abolitionism.

Page 99 offers a glimpse of an essential aspect of Goodell’s thinking and provides an example of his gravitational attraction to democratic reform; however, it is silent about the book’s other leading theme: the formation of an abolitionist household. Goodell’s wife, Clarissa, and his remarkable daughters, Maria and Lavinia, are frequently on stage in this biography, but on page 99 they remain in the wings.

Visit Steve Gowler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lindsay O'Neill's "The Two Princes of Mpfumo"

Lindsay O’Neill is Associate Professor (Teaching) of History at the University of Southern California and author of The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World.

She applied the “Page 99 Test to her latest book, The Two Princes of Mpfumo: An Early Eighteenth-Century Journey into and out of Slavery, and reported the following:

The last full sentence on page 99 alludes to the tragedy at the heart of this book. It states “When the men arrived in Exmouth, Prince James was already persona non grata, and during their stay nothing altered.” Three pages later Prince James will be dead by his own hand. We will never know exactly why he made this choice.

The suicide of Prince James also catches us by surprise. Much of the text shows us two African princes who were savvy survivors who pushed and prodded to make their way home. Prince James and his brother John had left their homeland of Mpfumo, where the capital of Mozambique now stands, on an English ship in 1716 to help raise the status of their kingdom by establishing trading ties with the English. They were enslaved, but they managed to free themselves and make their way to London. There they were minor celebrities and there they managed to convince the English to take them home. When their ship home hit a storm and went into port for repairs in Exmouth, it seemed like it would be a short setback on a triumphal journey home.

In fact, most of page 99 is about connections between people, rather than ruptures. It details how the institutions that supported the princes used their networks to help the men and support their voyage home. Men were found to repair the ship and to show the princes the sites of the city. In fact, even the dark story of Prince James’ suicide has moments of hope. Two pages later, in the midst of his crisis, he went door to door in Exmouth looking for someone to let him in, but it was nearing midnight and no one was awake. If he had knocked a few hours earlier, perhaps things would have ended differently. But the reality of the suffering these men faced, the ever present taint of racism, always lurks in the background of their story. So it is fitting the page ends this way and, as a whole, contains both the light and the dark side of the princes’ tale.

Learn more about The Two Princes of Mpfumo at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin M.B. O'Halloran's "East of Empire"

Erin M.B. O'Halloran is Marie Sklodowska Curie European Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

She applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, East of Empire: Egypt, India, and the World between the Wars, and reported the following:

Conveniently, page 99 begins with the opening of a new sentence, albeit in the middle of a thought. The page is situated toward the end of a chapter on Indian and Arab reactions to Italy’s highly illegal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, often referred to in the historical literature as the Abyssinian Crisis. The invasion, which violated the League of Nations Charter, provoked widespread outrage across much of the world (East and West), and is often identified as the moment at which the post-WWI international legal order began to cave in. The subheading of this particular section is “Enemies in Common”.

As the page opens, we are discussing the small but important minority of Indian and Arab anti-colonial leaders, thinkers and activists who warmed to Mussolini in the mid-1930’s: men like Shakib Arslan, Subhas Chandra Bose, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and Anis Daoud. In the middle of the first paragraph I introduce another sub-set of Mussolini’s Middle Eastern admirers: the ‘Revisionist' Zionists led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. At the height of the crisis in late 1935, page 99 recounts, "the rightwing movement’s official newspaper, HaYarden, published multiple editorials celebrating the prospect of 'an Ethiopia conquered by Italy, which would thrive and prosper like any other European colony', and warning that reversals in policy would amount to 'a failure for the white race’.”

The next paragraph contrasts the cynical manoeuvring of fascist Italy and its Arab, Indian, and Jewish nationalist allies with the Eastern humanism of the Egyptian author Muhammad Lutfi Goma’a, who rallied his countrymen to the Ethiopian cause, and Indian Muslim internationalists like Shawkat Ali, who had called for the Army of India to intervene against Italy's aggression.

In the page’s final paragraph, I evoke Mattias Olesen’s observation that "the Abyssinian Crisis became a ‘quilting point’ at which national and transnational debates over liberalism and fascism, nationalism and pluralism, and the ongoing struggle against colonialism converged.” I argue that the crisis created a common front across a wide range of Arab and Indian thinkers, "whether expressed in the language of anticolonialism, antifascism, antiracism, or universal ethics. Mobilized in defense of Christian Africans, this was the East at something approaching its most expansive, universal-humanist frontiers. It was equally telling who fell beyond the Eastern consensus: a minority of Islamists, anticolonial nationalists and militant Zionists all perceived in the Italian invasion a classically Machiavellian opening for advancement of narrower agendas.”

The Page 99 Test is pretty successful. Page 99 gives readers a decent overview of some of the key themes and arguments my book makes about Easternism and its discontents. My one reservation is that page 99 might give readers the impression that East of Empire is mostly engaged in text analysis or parsing out competing strands of political thought. I’d like to think there is much meatier storytelling going on in most of the book than you happen to encounter on this particular page.

Intriguingly, several readers have recently told me that Chapter Four, where page 99 is situated, is when the book “really takes off”. This is gratifying, as for some time during the drafting and review process, my editor and I were both less than certain what it was “doing” for the overall argument. That changed in the fall and winter of 2023-4, as I sat down to revise the manuscript. Suddenly, I felt I had new, visceral, and to my mind much more compelling set of insights into what the Abyssinian Crisis meant. The research, the material was all already on the page, and had been for years. But now I finally understood why it mattered to the rest of the story I was telling.

Visit Erin M.B. O'Halloran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie N. Baker's "Abortion Pills"

Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Professor of American Studies and the Chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Her books include The Women’s Movement Against Sexual Harassment and Fighting the US Sex Trade, and scores of peer-reviewed scholarly articles on gender, law, and social movements for women’s rights. She is a regular writer and contributing editor at Ms. magazine, covering reproductive rights, discrimination in employment and education, sexual harassment, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Baker applied the “Page 99 Test to her latest book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, and reported the following:

#FreeTheAbortionPill

At page 99, The World Health Organization had just declared that the COVID-19 outbreak was a global pandemic. State and local governments began issuing stay-at-home orders to combat spread of the disease. Many schools and businesses shut down and governors issued orders delaying non-essential medical procedures to preserve protective gear for medical workers. In several states, including Texas, Alabama, Iowa, Ohio and Oklahoma, governors declared abortion was a non-essential medical procedure. In response, reproductive freedom advocates called on Trump’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove longstanding in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill mifepristone so that people could obtain abortion pills without having to travel to abortion clinics to pick them up.

Page 99 describes the National Women’s Health Network’s social media campaign called “Get the Pill Where You Take It—At Home!” with the hashtag #FreeTheAbortionPill, a video, a petition, and digital billboards. “There are more complications and deaths associated with Tylenol than mifepristone,” said Dr. Jamila Perritt of Physicians for Reproductive Health. Page 99 also quotes NWHN’s executive director Cynthia Pearson later reflections on the campaign: “We might not have even tried without the pandemic. But it was just the moment. Things were really different. We realized we could do things now that we couldn’t have done two to four months ago.” Page 99 also quotes New York attorney gender Leticia James: “As the coronavirus spreads across the country and residents are asked to stay at home, the federal government should be doing everything in its power to ensure … that no woman is forced to risk her health while exercising her constitutional right to abortion.”

In the third of six chapters, page 99 (of 237) describes a dramatic turning point in the decades-long fight to increase access to the abortion pill mifepristone. By quoting activists and government officials, page 99 gives browsers a good idea of the whole work. For the book, I conducted interviews with over 80 activists, researchers, policymakers, lawyers and people who have used abortion pills. The book is full of the voices of these folks. In addition to sharing several powerful statements from these interviews, page 99 draws on information from a press release, a newspaper op ed, and a letter written to the FDA from 80 women’s health organizations. By using a broad range of sources and demonstrating the passion of abortion pill advocates, this page is a good representation of the book as a whole. Piquing the browser’s curiosity, this page leaves them without a resolution, which is how the book ends as well. Nevertheless, the advocates’ passion and determination may leave the browser optimistic that they will prevail despite tremendous odds--similar to how the reader may feel at the end of the book, and today if they follow my ongoing coverage of this issue.

In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned constitutional abortion rights and today 18 states ban first trimester abortions. Despite these restrictions, more people are accessing abortion today with telehealth and abortion pills than before the pandemic due to the creative, determined and courageous activism documented in Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, available open access here.

Visit Carrie N. Baker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Catherine Boland Erkkila's "Spaces of Immigration"

Catherine Boland Erkkila is an architectural historian specializing in American cultural landscapes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work has received several awards, including the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Newberry Library fellowship, and the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2016 Bishir Prize. She previously worked as the managing editor of SAH Archipedia and taught at Rutgers University.

Boland Erkkila applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements, and reported the following:

Page 99 – Here we join Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson traveling on an immigrant train across the United States in 1879. A newsboy boards at the Ogden stop in Utah, and becomes a comforting guide to the train’s weary travelers, who otherwise had no way of knowing when or where the train would stop next, or if there would be amenities available. Stevenson, feeling ill at this point in the journey, is especially grateful for the newsboy, who offers him a free pear and lends him reading material while he languishes near the propped-open railcar door, gaining what little relief he could from the train’s stifling air. Another traveler notes the small, high windows on the railcar, a design that allowed railroad companies to ship freight eastward in boxcars and shuttle immigrants westward by adding benches to those same cars. These travel scenes are put into the context of the railway age—where the railroad altered not only the physical landscape itself, but also the 19th-century traveler’s perception of space and time.

The Page 99 Test works surprisingly well with Spaces of Immigration, and readers get a good idea of the book as a whole from that one page. One of my goals for this book was to strike a balance between the individual immigrant experience and the larger cultural and political processes shaping that experience (forces largely driven by conflicts of race and class). On page 99 specifically, Stevenson’s firsthand account of an immigrant train merges with a discussion of the larger capitalist forces at play, wherein white European immigrants were often treated similarly to the freight shipped along the railroad lines (the treatment of nonwhite immigrants is also covered in the book, just not on this specific page). The design of the railcar itself is also discussed on page 99, which clues readers into the fact that this book is written from an architectural history perspective. While this page focuses on immigrant trains, the rest of book uses a similar approach to present the network of physical spaces (ports, immigration stations, waiting rooms, boardinghouses) along an immigrant’s journey.

One of the coolest parts of the Page 99 Test was that this specific page discusses the underlying massive cultural shift that occurred during the railway age. My hope in writing this book is that readers consider how this history relates to the present day. There are so many parallels between the treatment of immigrants now, in 2025, and the racist and nativist rhetoric of the 19th and 20th centuries. Furthermore, we are in the midst of our own massive cultural shift—the digital era, which alters our own perception of space and time—that impacts American culture in an undeniable way. The physical space of detention centers (especially along the US–Mexico border), the relationship between capitalism and immigration, and the restrictive legislation against specific national groups are well rooted in history, and the structure of this book could readily be applied to the contemporary immigration landscape.

Finally, a note to readers: I would love to see this book reach a broader audience! So, please, if you are able to request a copy at your local library, I would greatly appreciate it. An audiobook version will also be available by July 2025.

Follow Catherine Boland Erkkila on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

--Marshal Zeringue

Debra Michals's "She's the Boss"

Debra Michals is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Humanities Department at Merrimack College in North Andover, MA. She has written extensively on the history of women’s business ownership and its intersection with social trends and social movements, including an essay in The Business of Emotions in Modern History (Mandy L. Cooper and Andrew Popp, editors, 2023).

Michals applied the “Page 99 Test to her new book, She’s the Boss: The Rise of Women’s Entrepreneurship since World War II, and reported the following:

What an intriguing concept! When you open my book to page 99, you will find a photo of advertising mogul Mary Wells, circa late 1960s, sitting on what appears to be her desk. She is confidently running a meeting with several men in business suits surrounding her. The text that carries over from the previous page completes the description of Wells’ rise to the top of the male-dominated world of advertising. The rest of the page discusses how many women like Wells, specifically those in other predominantly male realms such as finance, blazed trails for themselves and other women to follow, though often without (at least initially) any direct involvement with the women’s movement or by identifying as feminists. Later, however, this page notes, some, like Julia Walsh, the first woman to own a seat on the American Stock Exchange, and Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (both in the mid-to-late 1960s), either forged relationships with feminist leaders as Walsh did with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, or supported efforts to advance opportunities for womenas Siebert did. The page ends with the first two lines of a new section that discusses increasing press coverage of women entrepreneurs in the 1960s.

A reader who flipped first to page 99 would get a small snapshot of some of the key themes of my book such as women seeing opportunities in business ownership that they could not find in the labor market and women breaking into male bastions for the first time. Page 99 also touches on two other important topics: the complicated relationship of women entrepreneurs to the women’s movement of the 1960s and their increasing visibility in mainstream newspapers/magazines and business publications. Page 99 comes toward the end of the third chapter which focuses on the changing social landscape of the 1960s with rising divorce rates, Great Society social programs, increased civil and women’s rights activism, and the ways in which women turned to business ownership to help themselves and other women through all of this. It’s also a chapter that shows how the 1960s laid the foundation for the revolution in women’s entrepreneurship that would come in the next two decades. While this is a fun page to land on, it does not capture the expansive coverage my book gives to the history of women’s entrepreneurship and to the various women who were a part of it. This page (which is really only a half- page because of the photograph) does not include immigrant women who started ventures or the rich description of African American women’s businesses in the 1960s, their links to the civil rights movement, and their efforts to avail themselves of the Small Business Administration initiatives to help people of color start businesses. Missing from this page, too, is the role of government programs in encouraging women’s small business ownership after World War II and in the 1960s and 1980s; the legislative changes (especially equal credit laws) needed to do that; or the way civil and women’s rights activists hoped their businesses could create a better, more egalitarian society. And while Mary Wells does go on to be a celebrated business leader with some famous ad campaigns, looking at page 99 alone would miss out on the rise of the celebrity entrepreneur in the 1980s and the increased use of the internet or growing interest in social entrepreneurship in the 1990s and beyond.

Visit Debra Michals’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Kalaidjian's "Spectacle Earth"

Andrew Kalaidjian is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Dominguez Hills, and the author of Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Spectacle Earth includes a discussion of one of the first works of climate fiction, Jules Vernes's 1889 novel Topsy Turvy, or The Purchase of the North Pole in relation to the manifesto of the London Psychogeophysics group published in 2010. It then turns to Guy Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle and compares the theories of the Situationist International to those of Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard.

[Topsy Turvy] presents the scheme of the Barbicane Corporation to purchase territory in the Arctic and then use a massive gun to realign the earth’s axis to be horizontal, thereby melting the glaciers and exposing landmasses for coal mining.

A new, horizontal axis will usher in an epoch of the “earthly globe,” in which temperatures will be moderate and advantageous to all sorts of human activities for enrichment. The company enacts the scheme by boring a cannon into the cliff of Mount Kilimanjaro, but the explosion proves ineffective at altering the tilt of the earth’s axis. A mistake of calculation is cited as the culprit, and the real force would require a trillion such cannons. The story concludes with a note of reassurance, “the inhabitants of the earth may sleep in peace. To modify the conditions in which the earth is moving is beyond the efforts of humanity.” This basic argument is the premise of much climate change denial, and it is one that the Psychogeophysical Society repeats, if perhaps unintentionally. At the same time, the society is onto something in their desire to revisit and reevaluate Situationist practices in relation to anthropogenic changes.

The work of the Situationists emerged at a crucial juncture between urbanism and media, lending their theories of alienation and passivity lasting relevance for the digitally saturated present. It was serendipitous that new technologies of television, the personal computer, and the mobile smartphone arrived in quick succession to save the modern subject from the boredom of the perfectly controlled, hermetically sealed environment. The open, white-walled boxes of modern architecture find their ideal antidote in the black squares and rectangles of screens. The saturation of media in contemporary times separates individuals, creates a false sense of connection, and discourages community activism. Beyond urban environmental aesthetics, it is this interpersonal component that remains important for thinking about mediation.

While the SI may have exaggerated their involvement in the 1968 rebellion, their environmental theories were nevertheless tied to social activity. While McLuhan pursued a technodeterminist worldview where enlightened man might embrace his destiny, Guy Debord and the Situationists brought a Marxist analysis of materiality and class relations to analyze media’s role in promoting apathy and acceptance of capitalist ruling order. Debord seemed to both respect McLuhan’s technical analysis of media systems and at the same time scorn his steadfast agnosticism in the face of social issues. Debord’s wariness was inherited by Jean Baudrillard who developed a more robust critique of media’s social influence and its limits as revolutionary technology.

Page 99 actually gives a pretty good idea of the book as a whole! The idea for this book began around a decade ago as I was finishing my PhD. The idea was to do an environmental reading of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle that could be a sequel of sorts to what would eventually become my first book, Exhausted Ecologies: Modernism and Environmental Recovery. Over the years, Spectacle Earth has grown into a larger consideration of how media helps and hinders engagement with ecological crisis. The technological changes during that time with the rise of artificial intelligence, remote conferencing, the metaverse, and social media made for an exciting challenge for thinking about key themes such as ecology, agency, and virtuality.

While this page presents something of the methodological center of the book, earlier chapters travel backward in time to consider a longer history of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led to the concept of the Anthropocene in the 21st century. The book also moves forward from media theory of the 1960s and 1970s to consider new environmental challenges in the age of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual reality. While literary texts remain an important touchstone throughout the book, I also consider many different forms of media such as painting, theater, film, television, video games, augmented reality, and other digital projects.

Learn more about Spectacle Earth at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Ofstehage's "Welcome to Soylandia"

Andrew Ofstehage is currently a program coordinator for CALS International Programs at North Carolina State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Welcome to Soylandia: Transnational Farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia is the first page of the fourth chapter - “Flexible Farming and the Weediness of Soylandia.” The chapter begins with a paradox of the Cerrado landscape, being that “to supporters of agribusiness, [the Cerrado] is both wasteland and breadbasket.” Further, we are introduced to another paradox, that to US farmers in Western Bahia, farming is “both so easy that it is boring and also requires ‘spoonfeeding the soil’” The reader is re-introduced to Frank, a Missouri-born farmer who now manages a farm in Brazil. Frank complains that “you can’t get farmworkers to do it the American way” and that “no American has taught a Brazilian anything” about agriculture. Coming away from this page, the reader will know that this chapter will explore the complexities of foreign farmers growing soybeans in Brazil.

The content of page 99 of Welcome to Soylandia provides an interesting test of the page 99 experiment. The reader would be right to imagine that this book speaks to agronomic, economic, and social challenges that US farmers face in producing soybeans in Brazil. It speaks to the specific challenges that these farmers face in managing labor and expertise on these farms, even in opposition to their own farmworkers. Further, the reader would be alerted to the fact that Welcome to Soylandia explores various complexities of these farmers’ adventures in Brazil - that their work there is a negotiation with the land and workers.

However, the reader would likely be confused and perhaps put off by the introduction of places and regions that might be unfamiliar to them. Where is Western Bahia? What is the Cerrado? In fact the reader will know that this is a book about Americans growing soybeans somewhere outside of the United States, but unless they possess a knowledge of the geography of Brazil, they will not know quite where.

Still, page 99 captures key themes of Welcome to Soylandia: farmworkers, soils, imperfect hierarchies of work, and flexible farming to name a few. Most importantly, the reader will know that this book, while dealing large-scale agronomic and economic change, focuses on the idiosyncratic farmers who are working with and against the place and idea that I call Soylandia.

Visit Andrew Ofstehage's website.

--Marshal Zeringue