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
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