Molly Ladd-Taylor's "Fixing the Poor"

Molly Ladd-Taylor is a professor of history at York University. She is the author of Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890–1930 and the coeditor of "Bad" Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America.

Ladd-Taylor applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

Between 1907 and the 1960s, more than 63,000 Americans were sterilized under state eugenics laws. Sixty percent were women. More than one-half were diagnosed as “mentally deficient” or “feebleminded.”

Page 99 of Fixing the Poor asks “who was feebleminded” and targeted for sterilization. To many readers, the answer might seem obvious: anyone who was black, immigrant, poor, unchaste, criminal, disabled, or mentally ill. But that explanation is obviously incomplete: most people from these groups were never sterilized. My book offers a different perspective by moving beyond the usual emphasis on eugenic ideas and analyzing the everyday administration of sterilization policy. My focus is Minnesota, where 2,350 citizens—eighty percent of them designated “feebleminded”--were sterilized under a eugenics law enacted in 1925.

The story of eugenics is often told as a cautionary tale about elite arrogance and the failure of expertise. In Minnesota, however, the determination of feeblemindedness was made by local probate judges, elected officials not required to have any medical or legal training. Most judges knew little about eugenic theories of human heredity, but they understood the usefulness of eugenics legislation as a means for coping with local problems of delinquency, illegitimacy, and welfare dependency. Most people adjudged feebleminded and eventually sterilized in Minnesota were either “sex delinquents" (often unmarried mothers) or poor mothers with large families dependent on relief. A judicial finding of feeblemindedness was the first step toward obtaining the institutionalization or sterilization of indigent county residents perceived as a burden on the public purse. But judgments varied from court to court. There were no consistent criteria for determining who was “feebleminded.”

As Page 99 of Fixing the Poor suggests, eugenic sterilization practices were shaped as much by state and local welfare politics as by concerns with biological degeneracy and “race improvement.”

Learn more about Fixing the Poor at the Johns Hopkins University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Queeny Pradhan's "Empire in the Hills"

Queeny Pradhan is a professor of history at the University School of Law and Legal Studies, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India. She was awarded the Nehru Memorial Fund Scholarship for doctoral research in 1996 and was a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, from 2010 to 2012.

Pradhan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Mount Abu, 1820-1920, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book has the notes to Chapter 3 ‘Acquiring the Station’ and it gives a diverse range of archival sources and references used with regard to the hill station of Mount Abu in Rajasthan: Abu Municipal Records, Raghunath Temple Records, Records from Sirohi State Archives, Foreign (Political) Department and Home (Public) Department Records at the National Archives of India. This is representative of the entire book where a large variety of historical sources have been used – temple records, tombstones, school records, church records, district collectorate records oral accounts, travel writings, maps, old photos etc. It contributes towards Historical Method.

Page 99 is also representative of one central theme of the book – the contestation of space. An impression that was projected in the descriptions of hill stations of Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund and Mount Abu is that these were empty spaces ‘discovered’ by the European or English officers. The references on page 99, as also the discussions in the book, argue that these hill stations were not empty landscapes but replete with human and historical experiences of the local inhabitants. These hill stations were acquired after much negotiation with the local rulers and chiefs and treaty agreements were drawn up. The local hill people have their own presence and this can be traced in their mythical and origin stories. The place-names indicate their sense of history. There were attempts at the erasures of previous histories by the nineteenth century English settlers. At the same time, the book does not construct binaries of the colonizers and the colonized. It argues that there existed multiple visions, aspirations, and imaginations within the rulers and the ruled and they were not homogenous categories. European and Indians also are not considered as the homogenous categories. The Empire in the Hills examines the unexplored linkages between Empire, Space, and Culture in the specific context of the colonial hill stations in India. In the Victorian period largely and in the context of the Tropical Empire, the hill stations as spaces and a part of place-making contribute to new knowledge and information about the establishment of the empire in India in the nineteenth and twentieth century, moving beyond the stark urban-rural divide to look into other spatial developments that have been taking place simultaneously. It looks into the themes of spatiality and representation, spaces and landscapes, and reproduction of social and cultural spaces.

Learn more about Empire in the Hills at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Henry McGhie's "Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology"

Henry A. McGhie is the Head of Collections and Curator of Zoology at Manchester Museum, the University of Manchester.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology: Birds, books and business, and reported the following:

From pages 98-99:

Background to A History of the Birds of Europe

The instigator of the History of the Birds of Europe was Richard Sharpe, who, early in 1870, proposed to Dresser that they go into partnership to produce a great encyclopaedia on the birds of Europe. The project required access to the very best specimen collections and libraries, whether in museums or private hands, as they were the most basic source of information on what species occurred where. New collections would also need to be acquired from explorers and other collectors. Sharpe had neither the opportunity nor the financial ability to produce such a collection, so he needed a ‘collecting partner’ if he hoped to produce his encyclopaedia. Dresser fitted the bill perfectly: he owned a good collection of European birds and their eggs; he could acquire more good specimens from his contacts and access the collections of other BOU members, and he could make sense of the literature on birds published in other European languages. Just as importantly, he was ambitious and able enough to take on the project.

Sharpe and Dresser intended the book to cover the latest stage of knowledge of the species that were found in Europe. The two partners had plenty to do: the last significant book on the subject in English had been John Gould’s The Birds of Europe, published in five volumes during 1832–37 (his The Birds of Great Britain, 1862–73, covered many of the same species, but did not review the wider literature). Charles Bree’s A History of the Birds of Europe, Not Observed in the British Isles, issued over 1859–67, was an inferior work. These books represented the ‘competition’. Information on European birds was scattered among books and journals in different languages, in the unpublished notes of colonialists and travellers, and on the labels attached to the legs of bird specimens. Information was of variable quality and reliability, and many species were as good as unknown. Large quantities of information had been generated about birds, in Europe and elsewhere, which meant that an authoritative ornithology on European birds was much needed.

Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology: birds, books and business is an exploration of the life of Henry Dresser, one of the leading, and most productive, ornithologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The book is more than just his story, but is an exploration of science and ornithology when the world was opening up (and being opened up) by travel and exploration, and when wealthy and ambitious private individuals (‘amateurs’) led natural history society, in the absence of professions and institutions. Dresser produced enormous bird books, by private subscription, that were a combination of the very latest scientific information and masterpieces of bird illustration by the most famous scientific illustrators of the day. The ‘page 99 test’ posits that page 99 should give a good idea of the overall standard of a book. In the case of this book, page 99 is unusually well-placed to set out the entirety of the book. The reason for this is that the History of the Birds of Europe, described on page 99, was Dresser’s magnum opus and most famous work. The book was both a bringing together of various strings of Dresser’s bow, and his biggest adventure. If we take a ‘hero’s journey’ approach, the work on the History of the Birds of Europe was Dresser’s quest. The scientific work that resulted from it, presented in his great books, was the treasure that he brought back for science, as a lasting legacy and basis from which further scientific work could proceed; the book, and the collections it was based on continue to provide scientists with a wealth of information on birds and their distribution. Page 99 explains how Dresser – ambitious, able and wealthy, and fascinated by birds – put his full energy behind the History of the Birds of Europe project. This brought him in contact with an incredibly diverse set of travellers, scientists, museum workers, and also country people, farmers, gamekeepers, lighthouse keepers, whalers, missionaries and many more. Dresser gathered their personal experiences and bird specimens and worked them together to produce a standard, globalized set of information on the birds of Europe, and their distribution in other parts of the world, in remote Central Asia, in China and Japan, India, Africa and North America. Quite an adventure, which forms an important part of Henry Dresser and Victorian ornithology.

Learn more about Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Barbara Sjoholm's "Black Fox"

Barbara Sjoholm is a writer of memoir, mysteries, fiction, and travel books, and an editor of anthologies and nonfiction.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Black Fox: A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The accounts Emilie later gave of keeping house for Turi seem to have been concocted after the fact for her foreword to Muitalus sámiid birra, and the explanation was repeated in reviews and interviews she gave around the book’s publication, and even as late as 1940. In these accounts it is often Emilie who came to live in Turi’s cabin: “I, who have had the pleasure of arranging and translating this work, lived with Johan Turi during the months he was engaged on it. An author should not be disturbed by household cares such as cooking, etc., so a woman’s help was essential.” But in letters to her family in the autumn of 1908 it seems fairly clear that Emilie was the primary occupant of the cabin and its hostess. . .It was Turi who provided most of their meals from fishing and hunting and Turi who cooked these meals (confirmed by a late interview Emilie gave in her eighties and that appeared in a Swedish newspaper with the heading: “Turi Wrote––and Did the Cooking.”) Nevertheless the smoke screen seems to have worked effectively at the time, so much so that for decades, up until recent times, Emilie was regularly described as Turi’s domestic and literary assistant: “The fate of Johan Turi... fulfilled the old rule: a poor, talented storyteller creates immortal literature by freeing himself from the demands of daily chores. That is what happened when Hjalmar Lundbolm, the director of the Kiruna mine, became the writer’s patron and the Dane Emilie Demant began working as his secretary and housekeeper.”

Emilie’s and Turi’s correspondence, however, provides hints of a deeper level of feeling between them, however masked in Emilie’s correspondence to her family. In a letter written at the end of August, Emilie quotes Turi as telling her, “I can’t seem to catch the Danish silver fox,” which she rather disingenuously describes as “proof of the Lapps’ image-rich language.” In reality, the reference to Emilie as a fox that was hard to capture was part of Turi’s ongoing but unsuccessful courtship. In the next few years he would often refer to Emilie as the Black Fox that the Old Wolf could not seem to catch. The black or silver fox is a melanotic variant of the red fox of northern Europe; Turi may have been referring to the color of Emilie’s hair or her quickness or simply her elusiveness.

One lamp-lit day in December, 2001, up in the far northern city of Alta in Norway, a Norwegian writer I know told me a story. In 1904 a Danish woman artist, Emilie Demant Hatt, had visited Lapland and encountered a Sami wolf-hunter, Johan Turi on a train. Later she inspired and helped this man write a book—Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami), published in a Danish-Sami edition in 1910 and now considered the first classic of Sami literature. Demant Hatt also wrote her own travel narrative, With the Lapps in the High Mountains (1913).

I immediately had questions, but for a long time, few answers. Who was this artist and ethnographer, Emilie Demant Hatt? How did she end up in Lapland, or Sápmi, as the region is now called? What kind of artist was she? Why was so little known about her, except that she edited and translated Johan Turi’s book? And what was her relationship with Johan Turi?

It took over a dozen years for me first to translate With the Lapps into English and do all the required archival research in Scandinavia for my recent biography of Emilie Demant Hatt, Black Fox. Along the way I published a travelogue of my own, The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland, and a pair of novels about Demant Hatt’s once-secret adolescent romantic relationship with Carl Nielsen, Denmark’s best-known composer. I learned a great deal about Sami history and culture in the twentieth century and about Demant Hatt’s unique place in anthropology and folklore, as a participant observer in the tents of many nomadic Sami families in northern Sweden. Her letters revealed the many conflicts and warm feelings between her and Johan Turi, and debunked many of the myths that had grown up around their working and personal relationship.

To my surprise, page 99 of the published biography goes right to the heart of the some stories about them, dating from the late summer of 1908 when they worked together on his manuscript at Lake Torneträsk in Sweden; the page also explores why Turi called her “Black Fox.”

Learn more about Black Fox at the Emilie Demant Hatt website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edwin Moïse's "The Myths of Tet"

Edwin Moïse is professor of history at Clemson University. He is a historian of the Vietnam War, and of modern Vietnam and modern China.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Myths of Tet: The Most Misunderstood Event of the Vietnam War, and reported the following:

Page 99 could function as a useful introduction to the book, but does not make possible a judgment as to the quality of my argument. The page consists entirely of a list of examples of the way US officials and senior military officers, late in 1967, were claiming that the United States was winning the war in Vietnam, and that enemy forces were weakening. These claims were a big part of the reason the Tet Offensive, a few months later, came as such a shock to the United States.

To judge the quality of the portions of my book devoted to this issue, the reader would need to see my evidence both that the claims of enemy weakness did not match the evidence actually available in 1967, and that those claims were strikingly disproved by the combat performance of enemy forces in 1968. None of that evidence appears on this page.

See online a more detailed description of the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jenna Vinson's "Embodying the Problem"

Jenna Vinson is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell where she teaches courses in the Journalism and Professional Writing concentration and also serves as a Research Associate at the Center for Women & Work.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Embodying the Problem: The Persuasive Power of the Teen Mother, and reported the following:

I had not heard of Ford Madox Ford’s theory prior to the invitation to do the “page ninety-nine” test. While I was, admittedly, skeptical of the premise, I am pleasantly surprised by the results! I do think page 99 is representative of the focus of my new book Embodying the Problem.

Page 99 is the first page of the conclusion to Chapter 3, “Challenging Experts, Commonplaces, and Statistics: Teen Mothers’ Counter-Narratives.” Here is an excerpt from that page:

The dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy encourages many to see pregnancy as the climactic moment of downfall in a young woman’s life. Commonplaces about teenage pregnancy, including the statistics that render it an urgent social issue, invite people to see young mothers as embodied exigencies—problems to address or prevent—not people who deserve respect and rights. In Talking Back, hooks writes of a need for marginalized people to reclaim and recover themselves by contesting, with authority, the structures and ways of speaking which objectify them. Drawing on poststructuralist theory of language and subjectivity, I have shown that some young mothers use their subject position as “teenage mothers” to craft and publish new stories, assertively reauthoring their lives to counter popular ways of thinking about teenage pregnancy and motherhood. By providing analysis of young women’s first-person narratives about pregnancy and motherhood, I provide a new way of thinking about statements from young mothers—as statements constructed for a rhetorical purpose.

Focusing on edited collections and a website that resist the imperative to sensationalize young mothers’ stories to prevent future teen pregnancies, I examined how young mothers tell counter-stories in order to intervene in popular constructions of who they are as women, students, and mothers. Describing specific strategies employed in counter-stories helps to identify the narrative elements and discursive tactics available to those who want to resist dominant discourses. In order to contest the commonplaces of teenage pregnancy discourses, many young mothers render uncommon the commonplace by re-iterating well-known statements about teenage pregnancy in ironic or satiric ways, questioning the fact that their motherhood is somehow “teenaged” or that their pregnancies determine their economic or educational success. Using narrative characterization, many young mothers also situate people who would construct or repeat such commonplaces as shortsighted or mean. These scenes invite readers to see those statements as barbaric and, as some mothers illustrate, as potentially pressuring teens to make choices they would not otherwise make (such as placing their child for adoption or not applying for college). Considering the current cultural context in which authorized experts—such as scholars, politicians, and medical officials—actively construct teenage pregnancy as a social problem, I highlight that many of the antagonizing characters in young mothers’ narratives are “experts.” This tactic may persuade readers to see the expert as fallible...

Chapter 3 is an important turning point in the book. In the first two chapters I provide a feminist critique of what I call “the dominant narrative of teenage pregnancy” and I ask readers to consider the serious consequences of the way we talk about young mothers (consequences such as everyday harassment of women, pressure on young mothers to leave school, acceptance of sexist assumptions, and more). Beginning with chapter 3, I shift the focus to examine how young mothers resist this narrative.

As I explain in the excerpt, I studied “edited collections and a website that resist the imperative to sensationalize young mother’s stories”—in other words, this is not analysis of MTV’s Teen Mom. These are published collections of personal stories shaped by women who have either experienced young motherhood or who aim to support young parents. An exciting contribution of my book is that it brings attention to the writing of young pregnant and mothering women who have, of their own accord, decided to narrate aspects of their lived experience in order to creatively challenge the idea that they are problems.

I will leave it at that so that readers can determine if page 99 tempts them to read more of the book!

Visit Jenna Vinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Scott S. Reese's "Imperial Muslims"

Scott S. Reese is Professor of Islamic History at Northern Arizona University and author of Renewers of the Age: Holy Men and Social Discourse in Colonial Benaadir and The Transmission of Learning in Islamic Africa.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Imperial Muslims: Islam, Community and Authority in the Indian Ocean, 1839-1937, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Registrar Khan and Da’ud al-Battah

Sayyid Rustom was not the only Muslim bureaucrat to take a hand in what could be described as largely religious matters. If anything, his successor M. Yasin Khan involved himself even more deeply in the religious affairs of his fellow believers. A native of Meerut in India, Yasin Khan arrived in Aden in 1918 as a fresh Bombay law graduate to serve as a “Temporary Extraordinary Assistant Resident.” In 1919, he was named Acting Registrar, an appointment made permanent in 1920. He served for at least fifteen years in this position in addition to a number of secondments as Hajj officer in the mid-1920s. Registrar Khan did not involve himself in the matrimonial affairs of Aden’s Muslims that seemed to preoccupy his predecessor. As Mitra Sharafi has pointed out, however, for many, engagement with the law offered “special opportunities for social mobility,” and the opportunity to act as important intellectual and cultural brokers between one’s community and the state. Registrar Kahn was certainly an exemplar of this kind of ambitious culture brokering, and, as such, he took an even greater interest in the religious concerns of the Settlement’s Muslim community. The result was a long-standing and complex association with the new Qadi of Crater, Da’ud al-Battah. Over the course of more than a decade, their association in some ways mirrored the confrontational relationship of their predecessors but was in others far more mutually beneficial.

Unlike Rustom Ali, Yasin Khan’s relations with the religious establishment of Aden began on a relatively promising note. Early in his tenure a group of notables led by the Shams al-‘Ulama’, Sayyid Abdullah Aydarus, with the support of the Aden Qadi, Da’ud al-Battah, petitioned the Resident for official recognition of a Wakf Committee to oversee the administration of local properties designated as “waqf” or “pious endowments,”, dedicated to the support of various mosques and shrines. In a letter to the Resident in February 1921, the notables stated that while there were numerous waqf properties in the Settlement, the agents charged with overseeing them frequently embezzled the rents. As a result, the mosques, whose upkeep was supposed to be paid for through them, as well as the properties themselves, were in a disgraceful state of repair. If steps were not taken, they wrote, the mosques of Aden would soon “become a danger to the public and the public health.” In an effort to remedy the situation, they wrote, “A number of leading citizens of Aden have met in [the] Shams al-‘Ulama’s house and appointed a committee of 6 persons ... with [the] Shams al-ulema [sic] as chairman to take delivery of these houses, to recover the rents [and] spend the same in the interests of the mosques and generally to look after (preserve) the mosques and their interests.” The British administration declined to formally recognize the Committee but acknowledged that the formation of such a group would undoubtedly improve the state of sacred sites within the Settlement. As such, they permitted Registrar Khan to act, in “his private capacity,” as an advisor to the group. In its first year of operation, the Wakf Committee encountered a number of problems in which Khan played a pivotal role, becoming an ardent partisan of the so-called traditional elite or, as we shall see, at least some of them.

On being asked to carry out the “page 99” test, like many authors, my first reaction was a sense of unease. What if page 99 was simply intellectual filler of interest to no one other than myself and making no contribution to the central arguments of my book Imperial Muslims? With great relief, I turned to page ninety-nine to discover that, indeed, Ford Madox Ford was right. While I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not this is a work of “quality” page ninety-nine certainly highlights certain critical themes of the book as a whole.

Imperial Muslims is a book about the creation of Muslim community within the confines of British rule. Set in Aden between its occupation in 1839 and the eve of the Second World, my work explores how individuals from widely varied backgrounds–hailing as they did from across the Indian Ocean–crafted a community utilizing the one commonality at their disposal: their faith. Specifically, I explore how Aden’s Muslims used common religious institutions, such as mosques, tombs, Islamic law and “pious endowments” to outline the boundaries of a community to which all could belong.

The relationship between Yasin Khan, a Bombay trained lawyer, and Da’ud al-Battah, a local Islamic court judge, is an instructive example. While from different intellectual traditions–and indeed different ethnic backgrounds–the two found common cause in their quest to control the port’s “pious endowments”–rental properties whose proceeds served to support mosques and other sacred Muslim spaces within the Aden Settlement. Such control allowed them to assert authority over the boundaries of community determining who was and was not an upstanding Muslim of Aden. While such efforts were not uncontested, they demonstrate an agency of individual Muslims that was largely independent of the imperial regime. So, while empire may have brought Aden’s Muslims together, it was Islam that made them a community.

Learn more about Imperial Muslims at the Edinburgh University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Natalie Carnes's "Image and Presence"

Natalie Carnes is Associate Professor of Theology at Baylor University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, and reported the following:

“[A]ttempts at pure iconoclasm degenerate into parodies of iconophilia, while attempts at unlimited iconophilia flirt with violence and idolatry.”

“The way images emerge from breaking images echoes the way crucifixes emerge from breaking crucifies, which itself echoes the way the Image of God discloses God in the breaking that is the cross.”

These two statements—on either side of a section break on page 99—get at some of the central claims of Image and Presence. While image-lovers and image-breakers might vehemently oppose one another, they can end up looking strangely similar.

In the chapter where page 99 falls, I am looking at Reformation iconoclasm in particular, when iconoclasm took a theatrical turn. In Basel, Switzerland, for example, a crowd hauled a crucifix into the square and mocked it with words that echo the crucifixion accounts of the gospels, “If you’re God, then save yourself, but if you’re man, then bleed.” In Hildesheim, Germany, a crowd taunted a statue of Christ with lines from Christ’s tormentors in the Passion plays. In England, iconoclasts stripped the altars—just as priest do at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, in preparation for the Good Friday service remembering Christ’s death.

These image-breakers make and parody images in their efforts to reject them. And the way images emerge from breaking images expresses the theological claim of Christians: that the one who is called the Image of God discloses God most perfectly in the brokenness of the cross.

With their acts of image-breaking, the Reformation iconoclasts want to say that God is not bound by human artifice. They proclaim God’s absence in these images in order to insist on God’s universal presence. But divine presence in absence is exactly what the image-lovers want to claim as well. The image gives more than it is. It names both the presence and absence of what it images.

On page 99, Image and Presence is moving toward the claim that certain forms of iconoclasm can be internal to the practices of loving an image well. But the book moves in that direction with a warning: Unmoored from any image love, iconoclasm degenerates toward an insistence of divine absence in the world, while image-love, uninformed by an iconoclastic impulse to insist on the absence of the imaged, can harden into idolatry and even violence. The rest of the chapter explores how that violence can arise.

Learn more about Image and Presence at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

J. Griffith Rollefson's "Flip the Script"

J. Griffith Rollefson is Associate Professor of Music at University College Cork, National University of Ireland. He has served on the faculties of music at the University of Cambridge and at UC Berkeley, where he served as UC Chancellor’s Public Scholar, implementing the community engaged scholarship initiative Hip Hop as Postcolonial Studies in the Bay Area.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality, and reported the following:

The page 99 test holds up for my new book Flip the Script: European Hip Hop and the Politics of Postcoloniality. It gets to a central—and somewhat controversial—thesis of the book, namely, that in European hip hop we can hear that African American “double consciousness” is the particularized US form of a global postcolonial condition. Instead of rehashing the played-out cultural appropriation vs. cultural imperialism debate, the argument flips the script on global hip hop studies, decentering US hip hop and suggesting that the black American experience encoded in hip hop resonates from global histories of colonial oppression.

The argument might seem self-evident, but this is where it gets a bit tricky. A central premise of the book is that migrants from the former colonies and peripheries of Europe are attracted to hip hop’s forms of cultural critique. Obvious, right? But, importantly, a lot of these postcolonial people aren’t black. Sure, the book centers migrant voices ranging from Senegal, Ghana, and Cameroon to Jamaica and Grenada, but it places them side by side with voices from Algeria, Libya, Turkey, and farther afield to Cambodia, Chile, Pakistan, and… Sri Lanka. This is the point I’m making here on page 99 [inset, left; click to enlarge]—that scholars, critics, and hip hop fans alike have had trouble with the hip hop influenced global mash-ups of the South Asian Londoner, M.I.A., generating a deeply suspicious authenticity and appropriation discourse… that is further complicated by gender.

As I stress on this page from a section titled “London’s ‘Other Blacks,’” M.I.A. is not “borrowing” hip hop culture to reinvent her “own” ethnicity. I love Paul Gilroy—he’s an inspiration to me and the major touchstone in my work—and I fully understand the power asymmetries and histories of cultural theft that permeate the history of Afrodiasporic musics. This is not an “all lives matter” argument. The point is that M.I.A. grew up in diverse communities in London’s immigrant “ends.” The music of her diverse, international, and polycultural community resonated with her. She made that music work for her (instead of sticking to her “own,” what?, traditional Sri Lankan music?). And while her music might make us uncomfortable, that’s precisely the point: it’s transgressive of ethnic, gender, and political orthodoxies. As I put it later in the chapter, “we can hear in this music the very thing we are afraid we might—the sound of the authentically inauthentic.” This is the sound of postcoloniality.

Learn more about Flip the Script at the University of Chicago Press website, and check out the book’s companion website, which has audio, video, chapter summaries, more excerpts, other resources, and information on buying the book.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Kix's "The Saboteur"

Paul Kix is a deputy editor at ESPN the Magazine. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, GQ, New York, Men’s Journal, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The cold forced La Rochefoucauld more than he liked from the woods into a rural society where every glance, every smile, carried possible malevolence. Who would help him? Who would betray him? The questions were infinite and without answer, and so he spent what time he could in the barn, trusting only himself. But seclusion invited contemplation, and that was no better than strolling through Quarré-les-Tombes in a worker's costume. Alone, fighters dealt not only with the paranoia of Am I next? but with the guilt of Why have I been spared? The Resistance leader Henri Frenay put it best: "I felt overcome with fatigue. Crushed, oh, I was utterly crushed!...One by one faces of all those dear comrades rose up to haunt me...I felt ashamed to be free..."

It seemed it would be December forever.

One night in the barn, fast asleep on a bed of hay, something jostled La Rochefoucauld awake. He blinked and saw a half circle of uniformed Milice men and the overcoats and felt hats of SD officers. For a moment, no one moved. Robert tried to hide the fear already warming his cheeks. The Nazis looked at him, curious. Then the blows fell. After a stretch, "They tied me up like a sausage," Robert said, and then began searching the barn. They seemed to know what they were looking for, and in a moment they found the guns.

"I had nothing to do with that," La Rochefoucauld said. "I was sleeping here because I was tired."

The Nazis didn't buy it. They put him in the back of a vehicle idling outside and headed out.

His mind raced: How did they know where to find the arms? Who had given him up? Someone in the village who'd tracked him? Another résistant? But soon those thoughts gave way to darker ones: Where were they taking him? And what would they do to him when they got there?

On page 99, the protagonist of the book, Robert de La Rochefoucauld, deals with the repercussions of a series of successful sabotages against the machinations of the Nazis' war. Occupied France in the winter of 1943 was a paranoid and even frightening place, where résistants who'd escaped arrest silently awaited it.

Visit Paul Kix's website.

--Marshal Zeringue