John M. Hobson's "Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy"

John M. Hobson is Professor of Politics & International Relations at the University of Sheffield and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (2004) and The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012).

Hobson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy: Beyond the Western-Centric Frontier, and reported the following:

Given that this is a 506 page book comprising some 190,000 words, so the objective chance of page 99 being significant for the whole book’s argument are slim – indeed a 1:506 chance! But if I could choose one page that is absolutely central to the book’s core argument it would be… page 99. This describes the twelve-sided Indian cotton textile (export) trading system that spanned Afro-Eurasia after 1500 and which reached out to the New World after about 1571. Its significance lies in my claim that India via its export of cotton textiles played one of the most important roles in weaving together what I call the “first global economy” (c.1500–1850). Moreover, India’s dominance of global cotton textile markets equipped its merchants with “global structural power”, through which much of the global economy was organised. For in addition to constituting the world’s single most important trading commodity, these textiles also became a universal means of exchange that both fuelled further transactions of non-textile commodities and enabled the emergence of other key global trading commodities. For example, the products/raw materials that the African slaves produced in the New World, including raw cotton, cacao, sugar, rum, coffee and tobacco, were made possible by the fact that the main commodity that the African slavers would accept in exchange for African slaves was Indian cotton textiles. But, while the British in particular had become dependent on re-exporting these textiles in order to purchase the African slaves, so the former became increasingly frustrated and sought to develop their own cotton textile sector. However, in order to compete with the superior Indian product, they had no choice but to mechanise production such that by the 1820s they finally came to export more of the British-made product. Accordingly, Indian cotton textiles and Indian structural power formed the basis not only of the first global economy, but they prompted the industrialisation of Britain through what I call the “Afro-Indian global cotton whip of necessity”, which in turn enabled the transition from the first to the second modern capitalist global economy after about 1850.

But why this emphasis on Indian cotton textiles? The key framework of the book is to challenge Western-centric conceptions of the global economy that award a hyper-agential power to the Europeans while the non-Western peoples are, by contrast, denigrated as but irrational and passive such that they contributed nothing to the creation of the global economy. This book instead focuses on the agential contribution of Indians, Chinese, West Asians, and Africans as well as Europeans, and reveals how they all entwined together not least through the trade in Indian cotton textiles as collectively they created the first and second global economy.

Learn more about Multicultural Origins of the Global Economy at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. Bianet Castellanos's "Indigenous Dispossession"

M. Bianet Castellanos is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún (2010).

Castellanos applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Indigenous Dispossession: Housing and Maya Indebtedness in Mexico, and reported the following:

Page 99 poignantly gestures to the central focus of my book – to showcase how Maya migrants resist the disciplinary tactics of global finance by demanding rights as Indigenous people in urban centers. This page wraps up a wrenching tale of an Indigenous family’s experience with home foreclosure in Cancún, Mexico. It invites us to consider what protest looks like and to acknowledge that, for Indigenous communities, public demonstrations are not the only ways to make resistance audible. Maya migrants Mariela and Francisco turned to collective protest as a way to stave off foreclosure, only to find that it was impossible to mobilize a public challenge against mortgage companies. Their attempts to form a neighborhood association of debtors against eviction were stymied by the bureaucratization of individualized debt. Since mortgage loans varied across households and neighbors were at different stages in their foreclosure proceedings, it was difficult to form a consensus over the most effective strategies to confront lenders who refused to negotiate with a collective. A lack of trust also impeded their efforts. Neighbors, who primarily hailed from far-flung states like Veracruz and Tabasco, did not socialize together and thus did not trust each other.

Instead, Francisco and Mariela drew upon a history of Maya collective resistance in southeastern Yucatán to cultivate strategies of resistance. For their ejido (collective landholding) community, the struggle for autonomy makes revolt ongoing. Similarly, Francisco and Mariela opted to “wait out” the state, a term I use to capture their efforts to convert waiting (for foreclosure) from a disciplinary tactic into an act of resistance that calls for a recognition of Indigenous rights in urban centers.

Page 99 concludes by setting the stage for the next chapter of the book which examines a legal battle against eviction led by Maya women. These cases reveal that Mexico’s reliance on neoliberal housing policies that privilege mortgage finance over land redistribution is leading toward greater Indigenous dispossession through land loss and indebtedness. The financialization of Mexico has resulted in greater precarity for Maya peoples and made the political project of recognition even more vital.

Learn more about Indigenous Dispossession at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Theresa Keeley's "Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns"

Theresa Keeley is Assistant Professor of U.S. and the World at the University of Louisville.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns: The Catholic Conflict over Cold War Human Rights Policy in Central America, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the second-to-last page of Chapter 3, “Subversives in El Salvador.” Opening the book to page 99, readers will not know that they are in 1980 in El Salvador and that San Salvador’s archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated just months earlier, in March. The page discusses the growing tensions and violence in the country after Romero’s murder, and uses accounts by U.S. Maryknoll missionaries to do so. Maura Clarke wrote to family in the United States about how death squads targeted “anyone suspected of being in an organization or attached to the Church.” As she explained, the Salvadoran oligarchy aimed “to wipe out the farmers and workers who have organized for change and they do this in the name of fighting communism.” Another Maryknoller, Ita Ford, connected the violence to the United States. In a 1980 October interview, she frustratingly observed, “As a U.S. citizen I’m highly disappointed and mostly outraged by the type of support we’re giving this junta. . . . The government doesn’t represent anybody at this point. It’s fearful to think of the U.S. now training Salvadoran troops and sending in equipment. It’s reprehensible.” But the U.S. State Department saw things differently. It absolved the Salvadoran junta, stating that “the question of government responsibility is not as clear” and stressed that U.S. “long term interest in the area” tipped in favor of continued aid.

Page 99 highlights key aspects of the book’s arguments. First, the page juxtaposes how U.S. Maryknoll missionaries and the U.S. government characterized developments in El Salvador. While Maryknollers stressed how societal inequalities prompted calls for change, and even revolution, the U.S. government saw communism as the source of inspiration. In analyzing this difference of opinion, the book aims to illustrate the relationship between faith and human rights activism. Second, the page mentions how critics condemned U.S. military support as furthering repression in Central America whereas the U.S. government saw it as necessary for fighting the Cold War. Both of these issues raised a larger question present in the debates over U.S.-Central America policy in the late 1970s and 1980s: What role should human rights play in shaping U.S. policy?

At the same time, page 99 is not fully representative. The page discusses El Salvador; the book analyzes U.S. relations with Nicaragua as well. Page 99 briefly mentions the danger people associated with the church faced. It does not mention why or flesh out how liberation theology was a key factor in prompting the poor of El Salvador and Nicaragua to see themselves differently, and then to push for societal change. Finally, page 99 may suggest that the book focuses only on U.S. actors. Although Reagan’s Gun-Toting Nuns discusses U.S. policy and political debates in the United States, I also aim to show the exchange between Central America and the United States. For example, experiences in Central America shaped U.S. missionaries, which led them to call for change in U.S. foreign policy. Additionally, conservative Central American and U.S. Catholics worked together to further their vision of what the Catholic Church and U.S.-Central American relations should be, while liberal Central American and U.S. Catholics did the same.

Learn more about Reagan's Gun-Toting Nuns at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allison R. Miller's "Kingly Splendor"

Allison R. Miller is associate professor of art history at Southwestern University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kingly Splendor: Court Art and Materiality in Han China, and reported the following:

Page 99 features a map of the Shizishan (Lion’s Hill) royal mausoleum in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, China, that indicates the location of the site’s six terracotta warrior pits, the principal burial, the queen’s tomb, the accompanying burial area for officials, and architectural remains. The Page 99 Test, in one sense, succeeds here, because the Shizishan mausoleum makes appearances in three of the book’s six chapters and is a prime example of the type of tomb that the book focuses on—the tomb of a relative of the Western Han (202 BCE-9 CE) emperor—a king—who governed a local province on the emperor’s behalf.

On the other hand, after viewing page 99, a reader may assume that Kingly Splendor is simply another book about the top 1%: an account of how the aristocracy used funerary art to support their own status and political authority. Yet what distinguishes this book from other treatments of court art is that it focuses on a group of ruling elites whose circumstances did not resemble those of elites in contemporaneous societies in other parts of the world. China was unique in world history in that the authority of aristocrats was questioned earlier than in other civilizations. This book documents how aristocrats, living in an age where it was no longer acceptable to justify one’s rule based on one’s birth, utilized funerary art as a political strategy to generate support for their rule. It considers how local kings, as critical links between the imperial culture of the central court and the local culture of the provinces, negotiated these two environments, commissioning works that carefully represented their relationships with the imperial court, other kingdoms, and the local polities that they governed.

Kingly Splendor problematizes the contemporary notion that the highly centralized administration of the mid- to late Western Han was the best form of government that the Han could pursue, highlighting the advantages of the unique center-periphery dynamic that we observe in this early period. The book begins with a revisionist account of the early Western Han administration that counters prior views that the system of rule by kings was inherently doomed. Chapter 1 contends that the multicentered system, stabilized during Emperor Wen’s reign (180-157 BCE), fell apart only because later emperors, favoring expansion and centralized rule, dismantled it. The remaining chapters consist of five case studies of local art produced during this early period. Chapters 2-4 study rock-cut tomb architecture, miniature tomb figurines, and jade suits—genres based on imperial precedent, which were significantly transformed when produced in the kingdoms. Chapters 5-6 focus on unique local products: wall paintings and purple textiles, which I propose may have been dyed with shellfish or “murex” dyes. Overall, the diverse topics addressed in the book will appeal broadly to readers interested in court art, burial traditions, archaeology, politics, and material history.

Learn more about Kingly Splendor at the Columbia University Press website. 

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Bowman's "The Invention of Martial Arts"

Paul Bowman is Professor of Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. He is the author of many works of film, media and cultural studies, on popular culture, postcolonialism, cultural theory, and martial arts. He is founder and director of the Martial Arts Studies Research Network.

Bowman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture Between Asia and America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Invention of Martial Arts: Popular Culture Between Asia and America is the beginning of a new chapter – Chapter 5, ‘From Linear History to Discursive Constellation’. The page reads:

Any attempt to construct a linear history of martial arts in media and poular culture as it exploded after the 1970s cannot but fail. The sheer proliferation of martial arts images, themes, texts and practices precludes easy linear narrativization. Accordingly, this chapter argues for the need to move from thinking in terms of linear history to establishing the contours of a discursive constellation in our approach to martial arts in media and popular culture. This chapter seeks to establish the main discursive contours that appeared and developed through the 1980s—a decade in which ninjas and Shaolin monks explode onto the cultural landscape. This is followed by attention to the 1990s, in which three major events took place in the same year: the first Ultimate Fighting Competition (UFC), the Wu-Tang Clan’s release of their enormously popular album, ‘Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)’, and the appearance on children’s television screens around the world of ‘The Power Rangers’—all of which took place in 1993. The chapter then attempts to track the major discursive tendencies and contours of martial arts aesthetics through the first decade of the 21st century, up to the mainstreaming of combat sports in recent years.

However, to be clear, the history of martial arts in media culture can only ever be partly written. This is because, from the staccato, sporadic and dispersed starting points that we have already encountered, so many strands dovetail and disperse, and sources multiply: the sheer proliferation of instances and examples of martial arts appearing in media texts of all kinds precludes the writing of a complete, or completely coherent, linear narrative. Nonetheless, this claim still remains to be shown. The proliferation of appearances (of bits and pieces) of martial arts images, imagery and narratives in popular cultural texts must still be sampled, even if opening up this particular can of worms only releases a cacophony. This chapter does this in order to illustrate the ways in which several faces of martial arts became commonplace and ubiquitous across media of all orders from the 1980s onwards. In scratching the surface of this, however, the explosion of texts and images that faces us serves to underpin the claim that establishing a linear narrative history of martial arts in…

I believe this gives readers a surprisingly good flavour of the book, as this chapter does summarise much of the content and argument of what has preceded and what will follow. From it, the reader can see that the book involves detailed discussion of many media texts – some fondly remembered, others all but forgotten – which constructed and traded in what we now know and love as the look and feel of ‘martial arts’. The book also undertakes a sustained theoretical reflection on the significance of these aesthetics. So, readers will encounter the kind of theoretical language suggested by page 99, as well as many rich descriptions and discussions of specific media texts. Text selected range from the early 1900s through to 2018, from Victorian Bartitsu to adverts for Hai Karate aftershave, from children’s cartoons to music videos and news stories, from disco hits to the UFC, from television adverts to the transmission of taijiquan and even the construction of lived identities. Topics covered include media history, cultural memory, orientalism, class, race, ethnicity and gender.

Overall, I think that the Page 99 Test works quite well for The Invention of Martial Arts, although, the chapter of which it is part is quite unique in the book, and written in a different tone of voice, in that it works as a summing up and taking stock. This is somewhat different from many of the other chapters, which take the form of setting out and assessing complex media histories, and so do not have the ‘overview’ feeling possessed by chapter 5 and page 99.

Learn more about The Invention of Martial Arts at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patrick Jagoda's "Experimental Games"

Patrick Jagoda is Professor of English and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), Network Aesthetics (2016), and co-author with Michael Maizels of The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016).

Jagoda applied the “Page 99 Test” to Experimental Games and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in the middle of my analysis of the independent video game Braid (2008). On this page, I begin to show how this game uses the medium-specific properties of video games to experiment with nonconscious experiences of computational technologies. Braid happens to be “experimental” in the sense of being an avant-garde or art game: a category that really took off around 2007 and of which this game was a successful example. But Braid is also experimental in a more profound sense: the game shows that, in any video game, a player is both an active experimenter and someone who is experimented upon. To give the player some critical distance from this technological experiment, this game plays with the figures and tropes of the familiar Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. (1985). On this particular page, I begin to discuss the ways the subtle narrative and visual details of the game gesture toward a post-1945 scene of the nuclear arms race, the rise of computation, and the eventual emergence of video games themselves.

In many ways, page 99 is not especially representative of what came before this page in my Experimental Games book. The opening pages operate at a more macroscopic scale, introducing a framework for understanding the importance of games in our time via economic, political, and technological histories of game theory, behavioral economics, neoliberalism, and experimentation across disciplines. The opening pages offer a large context, whereas this page is one of the first in which I zoom into one specific video game.

At the same time, page 99 contributes to a key method of my book: close and sustained engagement with a video game. As the book unfolds, I delve into popular games such as Starcraft and Candy Crush, as well as independent games such as The Stanley Parable and Undertale. Too often, games do not receive the same care that critics extend to literary texts across a broad historical range from The Canterbury Tales to Moby Dick to Native Son. With the rise of cinema studies, that kind of attentiveness is also evident in close readings of classic cinema such as Citizen Kane, Casablanca or Seven Samurai, as well more recent films such as Moonlight, Get Out, or The Act of Killing. An assumption that remains common among people who do not avidly play or study games is that video games, in particular, are more akin to mere children’s toys or entertainment products. While that is arguably the case for some games, others reward the same depth of analysis as important cultural works from other media. Even in the field of game studies, particular games are sometimes discussed quickly or superficially en route to a broader point.

Beyond the core argument of my book, about games as a host for experimentation and a medium of “problem making” in our digital and networked age, I’m invested in taking video games seriously as occasions for philosophical, social, and political thought. To do that, it is important to interpret particular games according to the unique experiences of space, time, velocity, interactivity, participation, system perception, and networked sociality that they make available. Video games are not just entertainment or even vehicles for behavior modification, but can also be media that impact how we can think, act, and change the world.

Visit Patrick Jagoda's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Paul Christopher Johnson's "Automatic Religion"

Paul Christopher Johnson is Professor in the Department of History and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and in the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Automatic Religion: Nearhuman Agents of Brazil and France, and reported the following:

Page 99 zeroes in on the role of a particular photograph that was confiscated by the police in Rio de Janeiro, in 1871. It was collected during the investigation of an Afro-Brazilian possession priest named Juca Rosa, accused not only of practicing dangerous religion—fetishism (feitiçaria) was the word applied—but also of seducing white women among his devotees. The trial was the celebrity scandal of the decade. Page 99 points out how the photograph acted as a key shifter from an older mode of law based on the colonial Portuguese code, in which terms like “fetishism” still held standing, to the new, national legal code. The defense lawyers pointed out that “fetishism” did not any longer exist. According to the new legal code, Juca Rosa could not be convicted of fetishism; rather, he would have to be accused of fraud (estelionato), pretending to have special spirit powers in order to exert sexual and monetary control over his congregants. Though fraud is what he was ultimately convicted of, the photograph allowed the prosecution to smuggle in the outdated legal terms related to fetishism and dangerous religion. It depicted him barefoot in African-looking garb, with a follower kneeling before him. Using the photograph as visual evidence, the prosecution preyed on fears of dangerous African fetishism’s power to potentially take over the nation—just as Juca Rosa was occupied by his spirits, and women were possessed by him. Though the photograph indexed a shift from one legal code to another, then, it also allowed for spectral presences from the past to still act in the present on questions of race and the national body.

Reading page 99 reveals an intriguing microcosm of Automatic Religion as a whole. Juca Rosa found a way to transform his very marginal status into fame and fortune, as a priest receiving potent African spirits in his body. He applied this power to the lives of his mostly black, poverty-stricken female followers, not only through his actual presence during rituals, but also in the form of his photograph, which all of his followers owned. He became an object of exotic and erotic fascination to some among Rio’s upper class. The photograph acted as a proxy, a nearhuman Juca Rosa that pushed his presence into new spaces and audiences—including, unfortunately, the police and of the court.

Other chapters add further cases of nearhuman agents making lives of their own. One is the itinerary of an automaton named Ajeeb who gained fame in Brazil from 1896-97 as a chess-whiz “Turk,” but who also mystified and motivated his audience in nearly devotional ways. Another describes the career of a Brazilian monkey named Rosalie, who became the best friend and companion of the famed French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Even as the nearhuman Monkey Rosalie traveled to France, Charcot’s category of hysteria traveled to Brazil. While France “hysteria” was mostly applied to the confinement and classification of women, in Brazil it was mostly applied to Afro-Brazilians reporting visions of spirits. Still another chapter details how a drawing of a slave by a French traveler in Brazil came to life in the 1971 and became an immensely popular living saint, “Slave Anastácia.” All of these figures—the monkey, the patient, the automaton, the drawing of a slave, the photograph—were described as lacking the human qualities of will, freedom, and agency. Yet though they were all described as able to act only automatically, they attracted fascination and even, sometimes, fervor and piety. The new nearhumans set new religious ideas and practices into motion, even as they made it clear that humans were only precariously unique.

In the broadest sense, the central thesis is that the trans-Atlantic circulation of ideas, animals, persons and things generated new versions of the great anthropological division of humans and non-humans. In the industrial age, the new vision of the division pitted those seen to lack will and mobility against those named as genuine individuals, possessors of the free capacity to act on and in the world, wherever they might choose. In short: automatons versus agents. By understanding how that divide was made in the great anthropological machine, we can also learn to unmake it.

Learn more about Automatic Religion at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Timon Screech's "The Shogun's Silver Telescope"

Timon Screech received a BA in Oriental Studies (Japanese) at Oxford University in 1985 and completed his PH.D in Art History at Harvard University in 1991. He has been at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, since graduation from Harvard. He has published widely on many aspects of Edo period art and culture, and has written several books in Japanese and English.

Screech applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Shogun's Silver Telescope: God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625, and reported the following:

About page 99: The English East India Company was founded in 1600 to trade in spices. Each voyage had its own investors, so was in competition with each other. Soon it became apparent that this was not a recipe for teamwork. In 1614, they created a Joint Stock, to spread cost and profit across voyages. First under the new system was commanded by Nicholas Downton. He took out £3000-worth of English woolen textiles, lead, mercury, tin, pewter and ivory, to a total of £15,000. This would never yield enough to buy all that was wanted in Asia, so he also took £20,000 in silver. Letters home from Asia warned that English voyages were being impeded by Iberians, and especially Jesuits. Downton therefore also took items to embarrass the missionaries.

This oddly sums up the crux of the book: The English wanted to obtain spices, but needed to pay for them with something. Their only bulk export item was woolen cloth, but that hardly sold in the tropics, where spices grew. They therefore also took silver. But once the war with Spain was over, they could no longer seize this at sea, so they had to buy it - which wrecked the economics. They therefore sought a cold, silver producing country. And there was one: Japan. The idea was to exchange woolens for Japanese silver, which they would in turn exchange for spice. In world-market terms, Japanese silver was cheap. However, Jesuit missionaries had been operating in Japan for decades, and they despised the English as 'Northern heretics', telling the Japanese they were all criminals and pirates. The English had to find a way around this, and impress on the Japanese what an advanced and dependable country they were.

The last point is: how did the English do this? They did it with two objects. Firstly they sent the shogun a beautiful silver telescope - the first one ever to leave Europe. It proved the truth of heliocentricity, which the Roman Catholic church could not accept. Secondly they sent a large number of erotically charged classical nude paintings - which the Japanese loved, but which horrified the church. Downton took them.

Learn more about The Shogun's Silver Telescope at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christina Zwarg's "The Archive of Fear"

Christina Zwarg is a Professor of English at Haverford College where she won a Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. After completing a Mellon Faculty Fellowship in the Humanities at Harvard University she published Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson and the Play of Reading, which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Book and Cornell University Press nominated for the MLA First Book Award. Zwarg has published on 19th and 20th century authors and topics in American Literature, American Literary History, Novel, Studies in Romanticism, Poe Studies, and Cultural Critique and Social Text, and her work has been reprinted in Norton Critical Editions. She has also served as a member of the Division of Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature on the Delegate Assembly of the MLA.

Zwarg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Archive of Fear: White Crisis and Black Freedom in Douglass, Stowe, and Du Bois, and reported the following:

The section that we encounter on page 99 hints at the influence Frederick Douglass exerted over W.E.B. Du Bois as he was writing John Brown and his monumental study Black Reconstruction.

Douglass's influence proves central to The Archive of Fear, but this page only indirectly mentions the trauma theory before Freud also guiding my reading of his work, one involving the mesmeric "crisis" that became associated with abolition after the Haitian revolution. Throughout his life, Frederick Douglass cleverly deploys the link between mesmerism and slave revolt in his approach to the work of abolition. The Archive of Fear follows these associations across his long career and explores their uptake in the second abolitionist novel Dred by Harriet Beecher Stowe and in their later elaboration by W.E. B. Du Bois.

Douglass turns his attention to the perpetrators and enablers of slavery, noting how the dread of "black supremacy" nourished and sustained a quick resort to preemptive violence. To redirect the sense of crisis developing around the idea of abolition, Douglass rehearses its fantastic character, showing how a collision of future and past fears could falsely align the goals of abolition with race war. Stowe explores the same hallucinatory register when she turns her eponymous character--modeled on Nat Turner--into a medium for understanding white fragility. And Du Bois takes the psychic register of crisis to the next level when he interprets John Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry: like the general strike in Black Reconstruction, whose aim was the abolition of systemic racism, Brown's goal was the destruction of slavery's violence and not the commencement of a race war.

As we see on page 99, the hesitation Douglass expresses as he recalls his failure to join forces with Brown fascinates Du Bois, who finds in that ambivalence a powerful tool for rethinking the Black Reconstruction of Democracy. Following Douglass once more, Du Bois enlarges his Marxist reading of Black Reconstruction to consider the "psychological wage" of racism, including the unimagined futures that might have turned men like Andrew Johnson, whose fear of "race war" nourished white supremacy, into champions of abolition democracy.

Learn more about The Archive of Fear at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aaron Tugendhaft's "The Idols of ISIS"

Aaron Tugendhaft teaches humanities at Bard College Berlin. He is the author of Baal and the Politics of Poetry and co-editor of Idol Anxiety.

Tugendhaft applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet, and reported the following:

The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet is only 115 pages long (including acknowledgements, notes, and bibliography). Page 99 is the central page of the book's five-page coda, which makes it the antepenultimate page of the entire text. Though neither idols nor the Islamic State, Assyria nor the Internet, are mentioned there, I can think of no more crucial page in the entire book.

I learned the word "antepenultimate" when I studied Ancient Greek in college. (It comes in handy when determining a word's stress.) Though my book's focus is Mesopotamia, it is ancient Greece that appears explicitly on page 99. The page provides a brief discussion of a work by the contemporary German photographer Thomas Struth:

Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin [...] depicts small groups and loan museumgoers in a brightly lit room filled with fragments of ancient Greek sculpture. While the composition recalls the engraving in the Illustrated London News [of visitors to the British Museum's Nineveh Room in the 19th century] it doesn't advertise the importance of museumgoing so much as ask us to consider why we take museumgoing so seriously. Encountered on a museum wall, Struth's large print (which measures five by seven and a half feet) confronts us with an image of people doing what we ourselves are doing---but the activity appears strange. We see that there are museumgoers in the picture, but we're not quite sure why they are there.

More important than the ancient Greek sculptures that inhabit the photograph is the effect the photograph has on its viewers: it makes us wonder. As I remind readers on the very next page, Socrates once explained that philosophy begins in wonder. Whereas most of the book deals with what I call prophetic images (developing an insight by the medieval Baghdadi philosopher Abu Nasr al-Farabi), i.e., images that hold a political community together by providing them with shared purpose to care about their law, page 99, by contrast, introduces the possibility of Socratic images:

If all images are incomplete, not all are incomplete in the same way. Some, like the [Islamic State] Mosul Museum video [of antiquities destruction] and the Illustrated London News engraving, hide their incompleteness by presenting matters as settled. Other images are overtly incomplete and pose questions more than they provide answers.

This is the most important point in the book. It suggests that there may be an alternative to either simply submitting to the always imperfect political claims that images make on us or smashing them because they don't live up to the demands of truth and justice. Whether we think of Socrates as a gadfly or (following the recently published pseudo-Aristotelian treatise "On Trolling") as a troll who disrupts the self-assuredness of our online echo chambers, thinking remains an ever-present possibility. Borrowing an image from Nietzsche, who recommends tapping idols with a tuning fork rather than smashing them with a hammer, I suggest that we might live better with the imperfect but necessary images that surround us if we learn to think critically about them. "Tapping images can make us keener critics of ourselves as well as others" (I write at the very top of page 99). Is such thinking necessary to democratic life? How might it be obtainable? These are questions that I hope my book provokes readers to think about.

Learn more about The Idols of ISIS at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue