Jean-Philippe Belleau's "Killing the Elites"

Jean-Philippe Belleau is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Killing the Elites: Haiti, 1964, and reported the following:

Page 99 recounts one of the worst massacres in Caribbean history, which occurred on April 26, 1963 in Port-au-Prince.

From inception, there are modes of killings. Some victims are taken from their homes or arrested at road- blocks by soldiers or VSN, and then brought to Fort Dimanche (…) where they are executed the same day. Other victims are randomly killed right on the street or in their homes in broad daylight, in the Pacot and Turgeau areas, by roaming VSNs and Presidential Guard officers. Victims include lawyers, businessmen, engineers, a museum curator, lawyers—mostly men. Members of the same families are killed together; one example is a branch of the Tippenhauer family in which the father (a businessman) is killed with his two sons. Some of the murdered retired officers were known public figures. Col. Edouard Roy had been Chief of the Presidential House. Col. Roger Villedrouin is also executed. Jean Bouchereau, a retired army engineer arrested in a bookstore, pleaded for his life (“I have ten children!”) before being taken to the execution site at Fort Dimanche. Of the 120 active duty officers who were killed under Duvalier, almost half were killed on that day. (…)

The massacre convinced many of Haiti’s intellectual elites, irrespective of their racial identity, to flee the country. Leslie Manigat, a promising Haitian scholar, fled the country with his entire family. The flight of elites was hardly new in Haitian history, as Matthew Smith shows, but up to that point those who had gone into exile had been predominantly men. On April 26, “state terrorism applied to entire families,” and it caused a massive exodus on a scale not yet seen before in Haiti.

Page 99 partly passes the test. Uncannily, page 99 recounts the most under-researched massacres in Caribbean 20th century history, and for that matter one that targeted almost exclusively the elites. It also exemplifies the gratuitousness of state violence under Duvalier: people who were not known opponents were executed because of their social identity. The book recounts many episodes of anti-elite massacres, in Haiti and in other countries, in the 20th century and earlier. Page 99 also points at one of the most tragic consequences of anti-elite violence in Haiti: elite flight. Page 99 therefore gives an accurate impression (but an impression only). In addition, the victims mentioned on page 99 are represented on the book’s front cover (Col. Edouard Roy, Jean Bouchereau, the Tippenhauer, Col. Villedrouin). However, given that Killing the Elites compares anti-elite violence across space and time, and develops several theoretical arguments about mass violence, the book cannot be summarized in one page only.

Learn more about Killing the Elites at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Elia Powers's "Performing the News"

Elia Powers is an associate professor of journalism at Towson University, Towson, Maryland. Formerly a news and feature writer, he is now a contributing editor and independent podcast producer/host.

Powers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Performing the News: Identity, Authority, and the Myth of Neutrality, and reported the following:

Ever wonder why broadcast journalists tend to talk alike? Three pages into the sixth chapter of Performing the News, I explore the origins of news anchor voice. More specifically, I trace how General American, a supposedly “accentless” variety of American English, became the broadcast news standard. It’s one of the central themes of my book. The Page 99 Test strikes again. Here’s an excerpt:

General American is viewed as broadly palatable and unobjectionable… Many believe it is also the clearest and, to viewers, the most authoritative… Yet General American was not always the broadcast news standard. In radio’s early days, there was little standardization. Provided that journalists sounded well educated, regional dialects were permitted. That changed when stations sought to unite the country around a “correct” form of speech with uniform pronunciation standards. As a journal article from the 1930s explained, radio “offers a standardization which freely admits certain outstanding localisms and regionalisms, crystalizing some, absorbing others,” thus developing “distinctly American speech.”

In the early twentieth century, many public figures who lived on the East Coast spoke with the British-influenced transatlantic accent. While some viewed that accent as sophisticated, others thought it sounded “artificial and affected” and preferred “pure” Midwestern speech. Sounding vaguely Midwestern became the norm in broadcast news due largely to an influential pronunciation expert from Ohio. John Samuel Kenyon was not the first scholar to reference General American, but he was arguably the most prominent. Kenyon, a linguist and English professor, authored several guides to American English pronunciation. Acknowledging that no official standard existed, he implicitly endorsed how he and other northeast Ohioans spoke as the model. Some linguists, however, dispute that General American ever reflected how people in Ohio—or in any region—actually talked.

Broadcasting companies adopted Kenyon’s guidelines in their speech and language manuals, such as the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation. An NBC executive promoted the ideal as “decent American pronunciation, affected as little as possible by localisms.” Stations established diction and pronunciation courses for announcers and newscasters, sending some to the Midwest to eliminate unwanted regional accents. Radio broadcasters received awards for speech precision and exemplifying proper General American English. Efforts to promote uniformity in pronunciation were largely successful. Standardized speech became the norm on radio and eventually on television, which originally featured regional accents before becoming increasingly homogenized.

While some norms have changed, General American remains the gold standard in television news. There are practical reasons for this, as I explain in the book. Many on-air journalists begin in small television markets and work their way up. To achieve big-market ambitions, they must appeal to hiring managers and news audiences who live in different regions and have diverse tastes. Sounding geographically ambiguous—like you’re from “everywhere but nowhere,” as one interviewee put it—can be an asset.

General American has long been considered a neutral, accentless way of speaking. However, I argue that it is not neutral. What is considered neutral has historically reflected tastes of white male news managers and assumed tastes of predominantly white, middle- to upper-class audience members. Neutrality implies not taking sides or not having strongly marked characteristics or features. General American privileges ways of speaking associated with educated white Americans.

Audiences are conditioned to view familiar newscaster accents as natural and authoritative, and underrepresented ones as inferior and unprofessional. Yet nearly a century ago, as page 99 shows, new broadcast speech practices did not come naturally to most journalists. They had to learn them.

Visit Elia Powers's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lee Alan Dugatkin's "Dr. Calhoun's Mousery"

Lee Alan Dugatkin is an animal behaviorist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of more than one hundred and fifty papers and the author or coauthor of many books, including The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness.

Dugatkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Dr. Calhoun's Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia, and the Future of Humanity, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“These females simply piled the strips of paper in a heap,” Calhoun wrote, “sometimes trampling them into a pad that showed little sign of cup formation.” Worse yet, if they encountered another rat as they were gathering up nesting material, these females would simply drop the shredded paper and start interacting with the other rat. Some females in the crowded neighborhoods stopped building nests altogether and just gave birth in the sawdust that was at the bottom of the nest boxes, something that never happened in a dominant male’s far less crowded neighborhood.

Mothers in crowded neighborhoods nursed their pups less often than females in less crowded neighborhoods. These females also showed little of the defensive behavior that mother’s typically display. In the less crowded neighborhoods, “if any situation arose that a mother considered a danger to her pups,” Calhoun wrote, “she would pick up the young, one at a time and take them somewhere safer and nothing will distract her from this task until the entire litter has been moved.” If females in crowded neighborhoods picked up their pups to take them to safety—and many times they did not—they often dropped them on the way and left them on the floor. Such pups rarely, if ever, survived. In a dominant male’s neighborhood, where mothers built good nests and nursed and defended their pups, 50 percent of the pups survived: Calhoun called these neighborhoods “brood pens.” In the crowded neighborhoods, where pathological togetherness reigned, pup mortality reached as high as a devasting 96 percent, the result of a combination of poor nesting and mothering skills, as well physiological deformities of the mother’s uterus. Calhoun sent the bodies of eleven females that died in the crowded neighborhoods to a colleague, Katherine C. Snell at the National Cancer Institute. Snell’s necropsy report listed severe uterine problems, including endometritis, as well as inflammation of the kidneys, some of which may have been the result of very high levels of vitamin A in the rat chow that all the rats were eating.

I’d give this a grade of B on the Page 99 Ttest. It fares well enough in capturing a snapshot of the experimental work that the book’s main protagonist, Dr. John Calhoun, undertook, and it also touches in on some important findings he made.

Page 99 only hints at the important, but utterly bizarre, experiments John Calhoun did to understand overpopulation in mice and rats, and how to potentially defuse population bombs in rodents. But there is so much more to the story, captured succinctly in an opening statement Calhoun made when he was invited to present the results of his experiments to The Royal Society in London: “I shall largely speak of mice,” Calhoun began, “but my thoughts are on man, on healing, on life and its evolution.” In time, Calhoun came to think that his work might be used to help we humans from overpopulating ourselves to extinction. “Of course, we realize that rats are not men,” Calhoun once said, “but they do have remarkable similarities in both physiology and social relations.... [W]e can at least hope to develop ideas that will provide a spring forward for attaining insights into human social relations and the consequent state of mental health.” The media and more latched on to all this and turned Calhoun into a scientific pop icon. He was work covered, over in over, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday and more. Page after page of Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book The Pump House Gang spoke of Calhoun’s experiment. His work led one of the writers of Catwoman to introduce the character Ratcatcher, who speaks of Calhoun’s experiments to his legions of rat followers. The best-selling children’s book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH likely had its origin in a visit by the author, Robert Conly (who wrote under the pseudonym Robert C. O’Brien), to Calhoun’s lab at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Visit Lee Alan Dugatkin's website.

The Page 99 Test: Power in the Wild.

--Marshal Zeringue

Audrey Wu Clark's "Against Exclusion"

Audrey Wu Clark is an Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. She is the author of The Asian American Avant-Garde: Universalist Aspirations in Modernist Literature and Art (2015), Asian American Players: Masculinity, Literature, and the Anxieties of War (2023), and Against Exclusion: Disrupting Anti-Chinese Violence in the Nineteenth Century (2024). She teaches literary theory and Asian American Literature at USNA. In her research, she is interested in Asian American intellectual history and wellness. She is currently the Book Reviews Editor of the Society for US Intellectual History. She has also published articles in Amerasia, The Asian American Literary Review, and Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies.

Clark applied the "Page 99 Test" to Against Exclusion and reported the following:

Page 99 of Against Exclusion uncannily exemplifies the crux of the book’s argument by falling on my analysis of Chinese American writer and editor Wong Chin Foo’s efforts to obstruct the 1892 Geary Act, one of the Chinese exclusion acts which required all Chinese to register with the possibility of imprisonment and deportation for undocumented immigrants. This page features Wong as a radical in contrast with his liberal counterparts in the book, Yan Phou Lee and Yung Wing, who sought and received the help of William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. who links Black liberation to Asian American civil rights. This relation gets at the heart of the book, which contextualizes the driving-out era of Chinese Americans, which included lynching by rope and other methods, in the larger post-Civil War era of rampant African American lynchings. The book differentiates between the lynchings of African Americans and Asian Americans in the late nineteenth century as quotidian and exceptional, respectively, but both spectacular and part of the liberal state of exception which requires what Agamben calls a homo sacer, a killed but not sacrificed other. Against Exclusion is the first monograph that contextualizes the first Chinese American court cases of Ah Toy and Mary Tape and the autobiographies of Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing, which have been documented as the first Asian American literature, within the driving-out era of the 1870s and 1880s in which Chinese Americans were lynched or driven out of West coast cities in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Wyoming, and Colorado en masse. The violent expulsions led, in part, to the 1875 Page Act, which prevented the immigration of Chinese women on the premise that they were all prostitutes, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which prevented the naturalization of Chinese immigrants, deeming then “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Surviving this period of rampant violence and legislated objectification, Ah Toy, Mary Tape, Wong Chin Foo, Yan Phou Lee, and Yung Wing “enfleshed” and humanized themselves through court cases and their autobiographies as acts of defiance and protest.

Visit Audrey Wu Clark's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Polly Zavadivker's "A Nation of Refugees"

Polly Zavadivker is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the editor and translator from Russian of The 1915 Diary of S. An-sky: A Russian Jewish Writer at the Eastern Front. Her articles and essays have appeared in Jewish Social Studies, the Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, and the multi-volume series Russia's Great War and Revolution.

Zavadivker applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I, and reported the following:

A Nation of Refugees describes how the world’s largest Jewish population experienced World War I and its violent epicenter in Eastern Europe. Page 99 falls within a chapter entitled “A Sacred Duty,” which explains the war relief campaign organized in 1914 by Jews in Russia’s capital cities for millions of civilians in front zones. It details how the Russian-language Jewish press publicized emergency relief work efforts during the first months of the war. Tens of thousands of homeless civilians had fled their homes in mortal fear during early battles between the German and Russian armies in what is now Poland and Lithuania. Writers in the press represented philanthropy and war relief as national and patriotic duties, as well the secular equivalent of the sacred obligation to give charity, a law passed down through generations that originated in ancient biblical laws of tithing.

The campaign generated great success, drawing millions of rubles in donations from nearly 500 different Jewish communities throughout Russia, including distant corners of the empire such as Baku (now in Azerbaijan) and the Pacific port city Vladivostok. I explain the novelty of this effort—that Jews dispersed across a continent-wide empire expressed solidarity with their beleaguered brothers and sisters, sometimes at a geographic remove of thousands of miles:

Rarely in the recent past had so many Jewish communities in the Russian interior raised funds for distant causes. In notable exceptions before the war, local communities sent dues to the world Zionist organization, and to support victims during the pogrom outbreaks of 1903–1906 in Bialystok, Odesa, Kishinev, and elsewhere. Mobilization for war relief in 1914–1915 occurred on an exponentially greater scale.

I wouldn’t say that page 99 provides a microcosm of the book, but it does present one of its three core themes, which include state and military violence, civilian experience, and the humanitarian campaign for war victims. The contents of page 99 convey the latter topic, with only passing reference to violence or the plight of civilians. Now, page 100, on the other hand…

Learn more about A Nation of Refugees at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Aidan McGarry's "Political Voice"

Aidan McGarry is Professor of International Politics and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at Loughborough University, London. His books include Who Speaks for Roma? and Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism. His research has been published in leading international journals, including Social Movement Studies; International Political Science Review; Ethnic and Migration Studies; and the International Journal of Communication. In 2018-2019, he was a EURIAS/Marie Curie Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, and in 2022-2023, he was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award at the University of Southern California.

McGarry applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, Political Voice: Protest, Democracy, and Marginalised Groups, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in Chapter 3 which outlines the key concept of my book, political voice, and its three core elements: autonomy, representation, and constitution. Page 99 focuses on constitution. It does pass the Page 99 Test as it advances the book’s main argument which is the relationship between protest, democracy, and marginalised groups.

Here is an excerpt of page 99 (references removed):

The articulation of political voice constitutes groups and affirms a consciousness, an awareness of one’s position, an apex of production which ruptures its surroundings and transforms the consciousness of the group. Most research on policy, politics, social movements and studies on revolutions look for impact and the proof of resonance on regimes, authorities, or institutions. This is not a central interest for this book. I attempt to shift the analytic focus and show how political voice actually creates groups through the act of articulation. This is a significant outcome in and of itself.

Articulation is therefore an action whereby a subject constitutes an object – a ‘meaningful unity’ or ‘unity of sense’- in a shared space. And so, the articulation of political voice crystalizes collective consciousness. We witness a dialectic process of subject constitution and object formation through political voice…Political voice is built on collective agency but does not collapse the individual agent into the group.

Status in politics comes from the constitution of the political subject, being seen and, in turn, securing recognition as a legitimate political actor. It is important to avoid the assumption that every voice will be heard because existing structures, the very ones which suppress and exclude minority voices, will ultimately decide which voices are heard and which are not. This highlights a tension with constitution, and one which suggests constitution is relational, depending on intersubjective interaction, specifically the recognition of existence. Do we really exist if others deny our existence? The same quandary arises when nations declare their sovereignty and create a constitution with newer states requiring other states to recognize their existence, Kosovo and South Sudan being two recent examples. Constitution through the articulation of political voice thus carries a plaintiff hope to be recognized as a legitimate political agent.

Page 99 highlights three central arguments of the book:

First, it suggests that the importance of the articulation of voice is in the act itself, speaking up and speaking out. When we think of protests throughout history, we often evaluate those that have ‘succeeded’ and those which have ‘failed’, but this misses the point. Protest should not always be measured by impact or perceived success because, for marginalised people, the simple act of making oneself heard is an important political outcome. This is especially true for marginalised people like queers, refugees, or ethnic minorities who are often actively silenced or excluded from mainstream political institutions.

Second, it explains how people constitute themselves through articulating their voice. In essence, we speak ourselves into being. This page reflects on how, in protest movements, the individual is sometimes collapsed into the collective, such as a demonstration. The group is often assumed to be a unified coherent and bounded block, when the truth is that all protests are extremely heterogenous and do not tend to act in a unified manner. The individual and her agency is sometimes lost when we examine collective action.

Third, it develops an understanding of constitution, when new political subjects are brought into being through the articulation of voice. A key part of this dynamic is recognition of others. This develops earlier arguments in my book on how voice is relational and ultimately requires external actors (such as the media, the government, political parties, international organisations, oppositional movements, and the general public). This recognition is fraught with problems because powerful actors will invariably seek to silence and deny the voice of marginalised groups to affirm their own power. Throughout the book, and on page 99, I argue that the articulation of political voice is the only way to change the status quo.

Visit Aidan McGarry's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rachel Louise Moran's "Blue"

Rachel Louise Moran is an associate professor of history at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique.

Moran applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America, and reported the following:

From page 99:

“PEP promised its phones were answered by “nonjudgemental listeners” who “do not teach or preach.” Its parent support groups and warm line were meant to encourage open conversation, which they attempted to do in both English and Spanish. Critically, “We are not giving advice on medical matters, but providing a sympathetic ear for everyday frustrations,” PEP emphasized.

The group told the story of one warm line caller, a woman with a ten-day-old baby. “I need somebody here with me,” the moderately depressed woman explained. “I just can’t get through another day by myself.” The woman was local, so a PEP volunteer spent most of the next day with her, and afterward remained in phone contact with the woman. In a few days, she had weathered the worst of it and was doing better.

PEP focused on mild to moderate postpartum distress, and its volunteers rarely used the language of depression. They would deal with the loneliness and sadness and confusion about parenting, the pressures facing the “supermom,” and would quickly refer anything more serious to a medical professional. But some women argued that embracing medicalization was not the same as arguing medical problems should only be dealt with individually. Instead, they said, these serious and doctor-managed postpartum problems also needed peer support groups.

Page 99 is the last page of chapter 4, “Supermoms and Support Groups.” It passes the Page 99 Test pretty well. The page is wrapping up a conversation on PEP, Postpartum Education for Parents, a Santa Barbara parents’ support group developed in 1979. They held meetings and trainings and ran a “warm line” to offer non-emergency support for new parents. They did all this from a peer-support perspective. The members were volunteers, and built up a model of parents-supporting-parents through hard times.

The group did not use the language of depression or mental illness much in those years but served as an important stepping stone towards programs that did. One leader of PEP, Jane Honikman, went on to start a group explicitly about postpartum depression in 1987. I tell the story of that critical organization, Postpartum Support International, later in the book.

I was fortunate to get access to personal papers from the early years of PEP (call logs, scrapbooks, pamphlets, grant applications), and to do an oral history with Jane Honikman. I think readers can get a peek at how special these sources are on this page. They can also see one major theme of the book, the relationship between medical professionals and grassroots activists. This page addresses PEP’s decision to not frame their support in medical terms, and the tension between the medical and social is a strand that runs throughout the book. Naturally, there are many book themes that are not present on this one page: the relationship between postpartum depression and feminism, celebrity and media, and political decision-making, to name a few. But page 99 is a start!

Visit Rachel Louise Moran's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Terrence G. Peterson's "Revolutionary Warfare"

Terrence G. Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Florida International University. He researches and teaches on France, modern Europe, and their connections to the wider world, with a particular focus on war, empire, and migration.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Revolutionary Warfare: How the Algerian War Made Modern Counterinsurgency, and reported the following:

Page 99 puts readers right in the aftermath of key French military operation, known as “Pilote.” This operation wove together a range of new counterinsurgency practices the French Army had experimented on the ground between 1954 and 1957, and it quickly became the model for the French war effort against the Algerian National Liberation Front more broadly until Algeria gained its independence from France in 1962. Page 99 focuses on a particular new kind of unit, the all-female Itinerant Medical Social Team, which sought to capitalize on the dire need for medical care in rural Algerian villages to gain access to these communities. This page lays out some of the activities of these teams—first aid, hygiene lessons, infant care, sewing lessons, etc.—as well as their true function, which was to spread propaganda and gather intelligence.

Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the book’s overall arc, in part because it hints at the disconnect between how French authorities thought these teams would work and how Algerians perceived them. These teams eventually became an important tool for the French Army to attempt to win Algerian hearts and minds, in part because Algerians needed the sorts of medical care and social services the teams offered. But as readers might guess from the relative absence of Algerians themselves on this page and the following few pages, French officers’ perceptions that these teams won Algerians’ goodwill in a straightforward way were really rooted in their own misunderstandings of rural society.

As the book argues more broadly, such efforts to capture the loyalty of Algerians were a central part of the French war effort from the start, but they ironically helped push many Algerians to embrace independence. Through the rest of the chapter that page 99 sits within, these programs appear to work, inflating the confidence of French officers and sparking the interest of foreign militaries around the world, who sought to learn from the French Army’s apparent successes. In the following chapter, however, the bubble bursts as angry Algerians (including women targeted by these itinerant teams!) pour into the streets to express their frustration at the French Army’s violence and to demand their independence. One of the key aims of the book is to counter many of the myths that still persist about the efficacy of French counterinsurgency by showing the full arc of the war and Algerians’ role in shaping it.

Visit Terrence G. Peterson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara J. Charles's "The Medieval Scriptorium"

Sara J. Charles works and studies at Senate House, University of London. She has previously published on various aspects of the history of the book.

Charles applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages, and reported the following:

Page 99 is in the middle of the chapter covering monasticism and manuscript production in the West, 500–1050. This page is about the development of book production on the Continent under Charlemagne in the late eighth/early ninth century. It discusses the influence of his spiritual advisor, Alcuin, on the development of monastic scribal culture and the spread of the standardised script, Caroline minuscule.

This page contains a quote from Alcuin which goes right to the heart of what this book is about. The quote reads:

It is an excellent task to copy holy books
and scribes do enjoy their own rewards.
It is better to write books than to dig vines:
one serves the belly but the other serves the soul.

This conveys the central notion that manuscript production was an act of prayer in itself – monks and nuns were writing out the words of God as a sacred task to edify their spirit. This ties into the Benedictine ideal of ora et labora (prayer and work). The development of Christianity and scribal culture alongside each other is central to the theme of the book, although after the thirteenth century manuscript production moved into the secular realm, and it became more of a commercial enterprise. However, the skill and dedication that scribes and artists displayed in creating beautiful manuscripts proves that they did enjoy their own rewards, whether monastic or secular. It also mentions the different texts the scribes copied, indicating that cloistered life was open to different types of intellectual material, which is explored in more detail later in the book.

The second part of the page explains how the Caroline minuscule script spread throughout Charlemagne’s empire. It was part of Charlemagne’s drive to standardise Christianity and to create a unified Church. While this was an early Christian ideal, elsewhere in the book I discuss the various different medieval scripts, and where and why they had the most influence.

Learn more about The Medieval Scriptorium at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Serene J. Khader's "Faux Feminism"

Serene J. Khader is professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic. She holds the Jay Newman Chair in Philosophy of Culture at Brooklyn College, and her work on global women’s issues has been published in outlets such as the New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

Khader applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop, and reported the following:

Page 99 picks up in the middle of an anecdote about author and lawyer Rafia Zakaria’s experiences in school and cuts to the heart of one of the main problems with white feminism.

The truth, at least as Zakaria saw it, was that her classmates were rebelling into an established subculture, one that didn’t deviate from mainstream Western culture as much as they may have hoped. The subculture is familiar enough that we can mentally populate Zakaria’s classroom with one-night-stand detail sharers and sex column advice readers...without knowing any of the individuals involved. It was a subculture that had the veneer of feminism, and some genuine engagement with both feminist and queer politics, but with accompanying heavy doses of plenty other ills of Western culture.

White feminists, and other faux feminists, often assume that the goal of feminism is to free women from social or cultural expectations. Zakaria, like many Muslim women, was on the receiving end of this assumption from classmates who assumed that her religion meant she was sexually repressed, and that she would be better off if she was more like them. This type of assumption extends into policies that oppress women of color such as laws around Europe and North America that prohibit the wearing of hijab.

But the idea that feminism aims to free women from culture does not just cause harm; it is deeply logically flawed. Page 99 is about the fact that it is impossible for anyone not to be influenced by unchosen cultural norms. None of us chooses things like the language we think in, which types of foods or working hours seem “normal” to us, whether it seems normal to eat with utensils or our hands. Inheriting unchosen practices is not necessarily good or bad, and it is certainly unavoidable.

Once we recognize this, we can see that feminism needs to be grounded in some set of values besides freedom from culture. We can also see another important possibility for fighting patriarchy and white supremacy at the same time—that it is possible to fight sexism from values that are rooted in culture. The chapter goes on to discuss feminists who argue that gender equality is a Muslim value.

The Page 99 Test works because it shows, like much of the book, that white feminism is deeply connected to the idea that feminism is a movement for individual freedom. It also works because it shows the value of philosophical arguments for social justice—being able to see the implications and downstream consequences of our ideas can help motivate us to seek better ones.

Visit Serene Khader's website.

--Marshal Zeringue