Zev Handel's "Chinese Characters across Asia"

Zev Handel is professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. He is author of Sinography: The Borrowing and Adaptation of the Chinese Script and associate coeditor of Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics.

Handel applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book describes the Chinese conquest of the northern part of the Korean peninsula over 2,000 years ago, an area in which writing was previously unknown. It explains how Chinese military control led to the establishment of a Chinese-style government administration and bureaucracy, which introduced Chinese writing to the region. After the Goguryeo kingdom re-conquered the region, wresting control from China, the kingdom continued to administer the region on the Chinese model.

In one respect, a reader browsing to page 99 would get a fairly good idea of the topic of the book, which is focused on the early history of the spread of Chinese writing into the areas of modern-day Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. The information presented on page 99 is important historical context for the way in which writing spread and was adapted beyond the borders of China proper. In another respect, however, page 99 is not typical. Most of the book deals with concepts and examples related to the adaptation and application of Chinese characters to writing non-Chinese languages. The first few chapters explain how Chinese characters were invented and how they function, in comparison with alphabetic writing. In doing so, they dismantle a number of common myths and half-truths about Chinese writing. Following chapters explain how Chinese characters were learned and conceptualized outside of China, before exploring the different ways they were adapted to represent other spoken languages in writing. It is these sections that constitute the heart of the book. For example, pages 108 to 121, building on the historical background on page 99, describe a song in the Old Korean language that was composed well over 1,000 years ago and explain how its words and sounds are represented using adapted Chinese characters.

Later chapters explore how written Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese eventually took on the forms known today, and investigate the question of whether Chinese characters might constitute a kind of universal writing that transcends language differences. (Answer: they don’t.) Because the book is intended for a general readership, all of these concepts are illustrated with thought experiments involving English, and do not presume any knowledge of Chinese characters or the various languages under discussion.

Learn more about Chinese Characters across Asia at the University of Washington Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brendan A. Shanahan's "Disparate Regimes"

Brendan A. Shanahan is a Lecturer in the Department of History and an Associate Research Scholar at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. He teaches courses on (North) American immigration and citizenship policy and comparative US and Canadian political and legal history. He served as a postdoctoral associate at Yale's Center for the Study of Representative Institutions, earned his PhD and MA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his BA from McGill University.

Shanahan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865–1965, and reported the following:

Readers who jump ahead to page 99 of Disparate Regimes will read an excerpt that gets to the heart of the major themes, recurring methodologies, representative historical episodes, and chronological hinge points of the book (though they may find themselves thrown in the proverbial deep end without important context developed in the surrounding pages).

Page 99 examines two political and legal disputes in Progressive Era Massachusetts. Both centered on the Bay State constitution’s long-standing anti-alien apportionment provision (a policy which counted noncitizens out of the population for the purposes of redrawing state legislative seats). Much of the page examines efforts in 1916 by James Brennan, then a leading Democratic politician and powerbroker in Boston, to gum up the operation of – if not outright flout – the implementation of the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy. As chairman of the commission responsible for reapportioning state House seats to the various wards of Suffolk County (home to Boston), Brennan offered numerous extraconstitutional reasons for trying to assign extra seats to his own district and wards represented by his political allies. These neighborhoods often had large noncitizen immigrant populations, which were not supposed to be counted for the purposes of state legislative representation. Brennan’s efforts proved unsuccessful, with his political adversaries scoring multiple victories against his plans in court. The page concludes by jumping ahead to 1917. It shows how Brennan tried (and ultimately failed) to convince his fellow lawmakers to repeal the state’s anti-alien apportionment policy as a delegate to the Bay State’s World War I-era constitutional convention.

Though a bit more technical than most of the book’s pages, page 99 offers a representative window into Disparate Regimes as a whole. My book shows how state governments retained significant power and exercised discrete powers to shape the rights of noncitizen immigrants in the United States between the Civil War and the Civil Rights era, a century often portrayed as a time of ascendant federal authority in matters pertaining to immigrants and immigration. It does so by examining how state politicians, jurists, and constituents (from blue-collar nativists and members of professional associations to immigrant workers and their advocates) battled over the passage and implementation of a range of alienage laws (policies governing the rights of noncitizens vis-à-vis citizens).

I argue that debates over state noncitizen voting rights policies, anti-alien apportionment provisions, blue-collar nativist hiring laws, and anti-alien professional licensing measures produced disparate regimes of citizenship rights on a state-by-state basis between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I further contend that continued disputes over the adoption, repeal, and/or enforcement of such policies helped to invent and concretize the idea that citizenship rights meant citizen-only rights in the American political economy by the mid-twentieth century in law, politics, and popular perception. Page 99 thus gets to the core of the book’s overarching arguments and illustrates their importance by zooming into two representative historical episodes.

Learn more about Disparate Regimes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michael Messner's "The High School"

Michael Messner is a professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of such works as Power at Play and Taking the Field.

Messner applied the “Page 99 Test” to The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024, his twentieth book, and reported the following:

When a reader flips to page 99 in The High School, they find two clusters of photos, reproduced from the 1944 Salinas High School yearbook. The seven black and white photos show girls doing calisthenics and modern dance, with captions ranging from the mildly scolding “Up and down! Up and down!” to the promise of feminine attractiveness to be gained through dance: “Grace…poise…and beauty.”

A reader would get a decent hint of the book’s content on page 99—after all, The High School contains 270 photos reproduced from yearbooks from 1903 to 2024, and focuses largely on the shifts and turns in girls’ sports over that time. The middle decades of the 20th century was a time of backlash against girls’ interscholastic sports, when physical activity for girls was largely relegated to non-competitive activities like dance. The few photos of girls actually playing a sport were often accompanied by insulting captions that underscored girls’ apparent athletic incompetence. As such, sports during this time both reflected and reinforced the idea that boys and men were naturally athletic and deserved center-stage attention, while girls were relegated mostly to the sidelines to cheer the boys on. A reader might understand some of this simply by looking at page 99.

But this snapshot in time would not reveal the larger scope of the book’s story. The half-century that included 1944 was bracketed by a wave of feminist-inspired girls’ interscholastic sports in the early 20th century, and of course by a surge of girls’ sports following the 1972 passage of Title IX, which continues today. Nor would page 99 suggest other threads in the book that focus on shifts and changes in high school cheerleading, coaching, and student activities—all contextualized by demographic change, shifts in political economy, wars, and developments in public schools and youth culture.

Visit Michael Messner's website.

The Page 99 Test: Guys Like Me.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christopher J. Insole's "Negative Natural Theology"

After teaching at the Universities of London and Cambridge, Christopher J. Insole took up his post at Durham in 2006, where he is Professor of Philosophical Theology and Ethics. He has published on realism and anti-realism, religious epistemology, the relationship between theology, metaphysics, and political philosophy, and on the thought of Immanuel Kant. His books include his two major studies of Kant's relationship to theology. His recent research has moved into a more contemporary and constructive key, engaging with the category of natural theology, as it meets the limits of reason and knowledge.

Insole applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Negative Natural Theology: God and the Limits of Reason, and reported the following:

Looking again at this page, I picture myself sat at the kitchen table with a convinced and ideological humanist, of the ‘believing in God is stupid’ variety. I’m showing the humanist some uncomfortable evidence, perhaps incriminating photos, or documents. It’s not fun for the humanist. But I’m not being mean, and I’m not revelling in it. I’m holding the humanist’s hand, and I’m sharing the pain: because, as I say at the bottom of the page ‘I take it that every variety of worthwhile commitment and worldview has its own weaknesses, pathologies, tensions and paradoxes’, and as I say on the next page, ‘a worldview without problems is probably too simplistic and reductive, and not worth defending or inhabiting’.

Because this is what the book is all about: tensions and fragmentations and limitations in our lives and thinking. I’m interested in these, and how and why some thinkers lean into the concept of God at this point, as an expression of their yearning for a type of wholeness and healing, whilst others resolutely set themselves again the idea of God (or, at least, against the word). I do a lot of hand holding in the book and sympathetic nodding, trying to understand the deep motivations for these different type of reaction.

The chapter on humanism comes after a discussion of absurdism (Albert Camus) and Karl Rahner’s notion of mystery, and before a chapter on William James and modern paganism. What is the ‘incriminating evidence’ I’m showing the humanist? Well, it’s this. There are two core commitments within humanist discourse: first of all, that we only believe things where there is strong empirical evidence, amounting to something like ‘objective knowledge’. Secondly, humanists really believe that studying objective truth ('science') will make us happier and more whole as humans. On page 99 I am gently suggesting that these two commitments don’t obviously sit comfortably with each other. Believing in the palliative goodness of objective truth looks a bit like a ‘religious’ leap of faith; but, we are not permitted to take such leaps, if we are restricted to ‘objectivity’. What if, I ask, ‘in the end truth, perhaps, is sad?’.

And I feel, here, a bit sad for the humanist. Being religious, I don’t mind people making such leaps, and I hope that my humanist companion might embrace a bit of inconsistency and subjectivity, and carry on leaping. If it helps.

Learn more about Negative Natural Theology at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lincoln Mitchell's "Three Years Our Mayor"

Lincoln Mitchell is an instructor in the School of International and Public Affairs and the political science department at Columbia University. He has written numerous books, scholarly articles, and opinion columns on American politics, foreign policy, the history and politics of San Francisco, and baseball. In addition to his academic interests, Mitchell has worked in domestic political campaigns and on foreign policy projects in dozens of countries, particularly in the former Soviet Union. Mitchell earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his PhD from Columbia University. He lives in New York and San Francisco.

Mitchell applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Three Years Our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Three Years our Mayor: George Moscone and the Making of Modern San Francisco focuses on the San Francisco elections of 1963. This was important election for the city because, believe it or not, it was the first time a Democrat was elected mayor in over half a century. Since the election of Jack Shelley, a Democrat who before becoming mayor was a member of the US House of Representatives representing San Francisco, no Republican has served as mayor of that city.

When San Franciscans went to the polls to elect Shelley over Republican candidate Harold Dobbs, they also voted for six members of the Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s equivalent of the City Council. Those members were elected citywide, and the race was quite competitive. Four incumbents were elected relatively easily, but the race for the sixth and final spot on the Board was very close. The winner was a 34-year-old lawyer named George Moscone.

Page 99 describes how Moscone drew on his deep roots in San Francisco, natural charisma and good looks, record as an all-city basketball player and the liberal moment to win that election. The page ends with a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle describing Moscone and Leo McCarthy, the two newly elected supervisors as rising stars.

This page describes a critical moment in George Moscone’s life. After winning that election, Moscone would spend the rest of his life in elected office. That 1963 election was also an important turning point in the politics of San Francisco. Shelley and Moscone’s victory kicked off an 18-month period that saw the ascendancy of Phil Burton to Congress and John Burton and Willie Brown to the State Assembly. Brown, Moscone and the Burtons were instrumental in remaking San Francisco politics and pushing it leftward. Their proteges, including, among others Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, were important Democratic Party leaders well over half a century later-and to a great extent it began with that 1963 election.

Visit Lincoln Mitchell's website.

The Page 99 Test: San Francisco Year Zero.

The Page 99 Test: The Giants and Their City.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shari Rabin's "The Jewish South"

Shari Rabin is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion at Oberlin College. A historian of American religions and modern Judaism, she received her PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 2015. Her first book, Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-century America, was the winner of the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Rabin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Jewish South: An American History, and reported the following:

The only full paragraph on page 99 of my book reads:

In Richmond, Reverend George Jacobs kept a list of the soldiers whose funerals he had performed; they came from Louisiana, Texas, and South Carolina, as well as Virginia. Charleston’s Jewish cemetery records the fates of Isaac D. Valentine, felled in June 1862 during the battle of Sessionville; of Isaac Barrett Cohen, killed in January 1865 at Fort Fisher; and of Marx E. Cohen Jr., killed on March 19, 1865, at age 26, “on the battlefield of Bentonsville, N.C. . . . by volunteering the performance of a service in which he lost his life.” In death these men were cast as heroic Jewish Confederates, although in life those two identities did not always prove so stable or harmonious, in personal experience or in the minds of their fellow white southerners. For them, the war was over, but for the families and communities that survived them it would last much longer, confronting them with important new choices about how to understand the recent past and what kind of future to build.

I think this gives a good sense of the book, although it is the end of a chapter and only a half of a page! It’s also worth noting that the book covers a very broad temporal scope, from the 1660s to the 1960s.

The Civil War is central to understanding the American South and to my study, however. On this page and throughout the book, I tried to present southern Jewish history in all of its complexity. Many have assumed that all southern Jews were supporters of the Confederacy and that wartime antisemitism was limited to the North. My chapters on the Civil War show that Jews – like other southerners – could be ambivalent about secession and war and that they did experience forms of exclusion. And as this page notes, the Civil War would cast a long shadow on the South and the nation for decades to come. Finally, this page highlights my original research, my interest in gravestones as primary sources, and my literary style. I really tried to write a historical study that was based on rigorous research but that would also keep the attention of a broader reading public.

Visit Shari Rabin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joseph Jay Sosa's "Brazil's Sex Wars"

Joseph Jay Sosa is an associate professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies at Bowdoin College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Brazil's Sex Wars: The Aesthetics of Queer Activism in São Paulo, and reported the following:

In the 2000s, São Paulo, Brazil claimed the largest LGBTQ Pride parade in the world, a figure celebrated by queer activists, questioned by local reporters, and challenged by religious conservatives. The parade, and particularly its size, seems like an odd point of contention in debates over gender, sexuality, rights, and identity. But as my book, Brazil’s Sex Wars, elaborates, seemingly trivial disagreements like those over crowd size stood in for larger struggles to define the role of LGBTQ human rights projects in Brazil’s story of modernity, democracy, the rise of the authoritarian right.

Page 99 brings the reader into the thick of the action. In a chapter on the promise and perils of visibility, we are dropped into a scene where queer activists debate what it means to “assume one’s identity” (the Brazilian version of “coming out”) in an urban crowd where one stood little chance of being singled out by journalists’ cameras. This example is one of a coterie of strategies activists used to deploy their bodies in the urban space to aestheticize and transform the meaning of human rights.

Does page 99 convey the central argument to the reader? Probably not in the sense that the reader couldn’t articulate ‘what the book is about’ from that page alone. But it does convey themes that are central to the book. How did urban and media performances actively (re)shape human rights paradigms in a decade of political transition in Brazil? How do activists deploy rights aesthetically, ie. getting the public to see (and think and feel) about rights in the same way they do? Finally, how has the language of rights, once the domain of the left, been taken up across the ideological spectrum?

Learn more about Brazil's Sex Wars at the University Of Texas Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alison Brysk's "Abortion Rights Backlash"

Alison Brysk is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a past Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson Fellow and is the author or editor of 18 books on human rights, including The Struggle for Freedom from Fear (2018).

Brysk applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Abortion Rights Backlash: The Struggle for Democracy in Europe and the Americas reveals a key feature of the transnational context that shaped a key case--Argentina--and highlights my book's uniquely global take on the drivers of national reproductive rights policies. But page 99 is not fully representative of the book's larger comparative analysis of the struggle between liberal globalization and ethnonationalism for control of women's bodies that plays out through democracy--and affects democracy's future.

On page 99, I discuss the regional Latin American Green Wave of abortion rights liberalization across Mexico, Colombia, and beyond that both supported and amplified Argentina's peak national movement. Argentina was the first Latin American country to legalize abortion in 2020 and has led the region in connected regional movements against femicide and for LGBTQ rights. Such transnational networking has been a key part of reproductive rights advocacy worldwide--and transnational abortion medication and migration flows help to compensate for backlash in some areas. But transnational ties are only one factor with different levels of influence, often outweighed by patriarchal forms of populism in the backlash cases of Brazil, Poland, and the U.S.

The larger vision of the book--to explain what is happening to our rights--can be best represented on a different page (p. 33-34): "In times of social crisis, deliberalizing the gender regime promises to push women out of the competitive workforce, increase the national population of threatened identity groups, restore religious governmentality to substitute for failing governance, and calm social anxieties about economic displacement and chronic insecurity, with compensatory affirmation of motherhood....The particular potency of populist nationalism is linked to struggles over gender roles, family policy, and reproductive rights worldwide."

In the rest of the pages, the book goes on to offer some lessons on how to defend our rights in an era of backlash. We can learn from the democratic political features and processes that shaped the disparate outcomes across the cases--from courts vs. Congress to the availability of popular referendums to feminist mobilization. The cases also suggest ways to transcend the culture wars triggered by the identity crisis of globalization by building more inclusive national identities and bridging gender justice to community values.

Visit Alison Brysk's website.

The Page 99 Test: Speaking Rights to Power.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew S. Berish's "Hating Jazz"

Andrew S. Berish is associate professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. He is the author of Lonesome Roads and Streets of Dreams: Place, Mobility, and Race in Jazz of the 1930s and ’40s.

Berish applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse, and reported the following:

Opening Hating Jazz to page 99 takes you to first page of chapter four, “The Musicians Suck: Contempt and Disgust in the Historical Reception of Jazz.” This is the penultimate chapter of the book and covers the kinds of jazz hating that happen—perhaps surprisingly—within the jazz community: critics savaging musicians, musicians denouncing critics, and musicians attacking each other. The title comes from an interview with saxophonist Branford Marsalis: in an April 2019 interview with Rachel Olding of the Sydney Morning Herald, Marsalis, reflecting on why the music is so unpopular says, “the answer is simple: the musicians suck.” It is one thing to criticize another musician, but Marsalis offers something much stronger, an expression of contempt toward others in the jazz community. In the rest of the chapter I trace the history of these kinds of responses, responses where jazz friends “fire” on each other. From the battles in the 1930s and 40s between the proponents of New Orleans-style small group jazz and the new sounds of the big bands to the polarizing debates about free jazz in the 1950s and 60s to the more recent discussions of jazz’s relationship to rap and hip-hop, jazz history has been defined by these explosive debates full of aggression, contempt, and disgust. There are many reasons for this, but at its heart, such overheated attacks are rooted in love—only a profound betrayal of values can unleash such negativity. As Freud noted long ago, love and hate are twins.

The opening of chapter four on page 99 lays out the stakes of this love-hate dynamic: jazz musicians play to create and share profound emotional experiences of sound and community. A key foundational argument for the book is the idea that attacks on music—on the specific sounds that musicians make—is only half the story. What also matters are people. Hating (and loving) jazz is a social act. For a music born in the Black American experience, jazz has been, from the beginning, about race, specifically Blackness and whiteness. Loving and hating jazz has always been about the lived Black experience but also the representations and images of that experience. This gives arguments about jazz enormous social significance. We are never arguing only about sounds we find pleasant or unpleasant, uplifting or infuriating, but about the meanings those sounds have for our very sense of self in a society shaped by the distortions of racial thinking. Hating—and loving—jazz exists at the intersection of sound, feeling, and social life. Although my book is focused on the specific history of jazz, these arguments are applicable to all kinds of music: heavy metal, pop, rap and hip-hop, and country. In the study of popular music history, focusing on the negative reception of a style or genre—from statements of mild dislike to tirades filled with contempt and disgust—reveal with great clarity the profound social stakes in our musical tastes.

Visit Andrew S. Berish's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amanda M. Greenwell's "The Child Gaze"

Amanda M. Greenwell is associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in African American Review; Children’s Literature; Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures; The Lion and the Unicorn; Studies in the Novel; Studies in the American Short Story, and other publications.

Greenwell applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Child Gaze: Narrating Resistance in American Literature, and reported the following:

If readers were to flip to page 99 of the book, they’d learn that the narrative technique I term the transactional child gaze “does not simply locate the child in the ideological environment…[but rather] enmesh[es] the child with the environment in the moment of seeing, binding them together in the ongoing alchemy of subjectivity and perspective.” The page emphasizes the necessity of active, ongoing reflection on the part of the literary child who looks transactionally, which asserts the child as “extant and active” within systems often built to oppress them. Children who look transactionally are depicted as enormously affected by their environments, but not necessarily deterministically; the transactional child gaze, due to the child’s agency, is a potentially destabilizing force.

Page 99 falls on the third page of chapter three, and it hosts a great passage to help readers understand the premise of the chapter, though not the whole book. It captures some of the key introductory concepts that will be explored later in the section through close readings of The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Ultimately, the chapter argues that “the transactional child gaze allows an interrogation of the ideological scripts that are brought to bear upon the child as well as the visual methods by which they interpellate the subject” (131).

The page only manages to convey a hint of the larger scope of the project, however. It makes brief reference to the appreciative child gaze and the countersurveillant child gaze, which are discussed in chapters one and two, respectively, but it does not describe those modes of gazing. Readers will have to visit those chapters to learn how and to what effect the appreciative child gaze conjures reactions along a spectrum of celebration to weighty consideration, and to understand the various methods by which a countersurvelliant child gaze creates striking indictments of abusive power on the level of narrative, even when child looking does not effect real change within the storyworld of the text. And nothing on page 99 would point readers to the fourth chapter, which explores the manifestation of these various modes of child gazing on the comics page, including depictions of the direct gaze, which implicates the reader through the fourth wall.

The central premise of the book might be inferred from page 99: that literary texts invoke several modes of child looking to perform social critique. However, it would not make clear how the book draws on work in the cultural history of the American child, children’s literature, rhetorical and critical race narratology, visual culture studies, and several other fields to craft a critical conversation that helps us comprehend the various ways US texts from the 1930s to the 2010s employed nuanced child gazing to talk back to hegemonic US structures of national belonging. And readers would miss out on the call for further work on the child gaze in the future!

Learn more about The Child Gaze at the University Press of Mississippi website.

--Marshal Zeringue