Japonica Brown-Saracino's "The Death and Life of Gentrification"

Japonica Brown-Saracino is a regular commentator for major news organizations such as CNN, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, and is the award-winning author of A Neighborhood that Never Changes: Gentrification, Social Preservation, and the Search for Authenticity and How Places Make Us: Novel LBQ Identities in Four Small Cities. She is professor of sociology and women’s, gender, and sexualities studies at Boston University, where she serves as faculty fellow at the Initiative on Cities.

Brown-Saracino applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, with the following results:

Talk of gentrification abounds. References to gentrification appear in television series, social media posts, novels, and art. But the word doesn’t just evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification anymore. People reference the “gentrification” of donuts, collard greens, and even our own selves. Gentrification is a tool many rely on to signal transformations far afield from urban redevelopment, particularly those associated with appropriation and diminishing community and “authenticity.” Above all else, gentrification communicates loss.

But even as gentrification works to mark and mourn certain transformations, it doesn’t always help us speak directly about them. Sometimes, relying on gentrification as a shorthand prevents us from directly addressing precisely that which we hope the term gestures to, serving as a faulty metonym for what really troubles us. This can be true even when one hopes that engagement with gentrification will generate resistance to urban upscaling. This dissonance emerges, in part, from the fact that gentrification evokes such general feelings of loss that it can gesture to issues well beyond brick-and-mortar gentrification.

Like much of The Death and Life of Gentrification: A New Map of a Persistent Idea, page 99 explores what gentrification means and how it works for what the sociologist Wendy Griswold calls “cultural producers.” While much of the book examines novels, newspaper articles, academic texts, and activists’ narratives, page 99 departs from that trend by featuring the work of an artist. In addition, page 99 is distinctive in its attention to a work that aims to evoke brick-and-mortar gentrification, while also using the process a metonym for a broader set of losses. This stands in contrast to those who rely on gentrification purely as a metaphor, such as when we quip about the gentrification of tattoos or beer.

Specifically, page 99 engages an incredibly evocative sculpture, made by the artist Pat Falco, which the artist displayed in Boston’s upscale Seaport neighborhood in 2019. The sculpture, entitled Mock, was presented as a mockup of Boston’s most iconic housing form: the triple decker. Throughout the 20th century, the triple decker provided affordable housing for many working-class Bostonians; the form is particularly associated with White immigrant and ethnic populations. In the triple decker that Mock presents, colorful wallpaper dominates the walls, with frames around statements such as, “here lies the body of democratic architecture,” “a nod to our colonial future,” and “the illusion of a single family home.” Another image depicts a photo of clothes on the line behind a triple decker. Mock’s warm and cozy interior stands in stark contrast to neaby steel and glass towers.

Via Mock, Falco meant to contrast the humble triple decker with the Seaport’s luxury housing. Mock asks why recent development so often serves the wealthy, and why we’ve let working class housing disappear. Mock is meant to offer criticaon brick-and-mortar gentrification.

However, I ask readers to consider the messages we unintentionally communicate when we evoke gentrification. Mock is no exception. It communicates feeling, including connection to home, place, and family – and the fragility of that connection. More than anything, it communicates loss. However, by situating Mock in a triple-decker that harkens to the first part of the 20th century, before gentrification ascended, it conjures nostalgia for neighborhood groups that dispersed in the mid-20th century, before brick-and-mortar gentrification took root. Many of those who once assembled in the rooms Mock presents left Boston due to suburbanization, White flight, and upward mobility. While Falco aims to underline the consequences of gentrification for today’s working-class Bostonians, most of whom are demographically distinct from those who populated triple-deckers in the period Mock commemorates, by gesturing to the distant past, he evokes nostalgia for a Boston that changed before literal gentrification. In this sense, Mock gestures to the loss of community, but the sculpture references a time when many experienced losses because of mobility, rather than gentrification.

Page 99 instructs that sometimes, even when we aim to talk about brick-and-mortagentrification, we end up gesturing to other issues. This is, in part, because gentrification has come to evoke more feeling than action. Today, gentrification is so evocative of loss that it conjures a general loss, rather than loss specific to gentrification. My book calls for critical reflection on what we really evoke when we call on gentrification as a symbol.

Learn more about The Death and Life of Gentrification at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Neighborhood That Never Changes.

The Page 99 Test: How Places Make Us.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Igler' "All Species of Knowledge"

David Igler is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His books include The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (2013), which won the Sally and Ken Owens Award of the Western History Association and the John Lyman Book Award for U.S. Maritime History of the North American Society for Oceanic History, and Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920.

Igler applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, All Species of Knowledge: A Voyage of Discovery, Failure, and Natural History in the Pacific Ocean, and shared the following:

The Page 99 Test works exceedingly well for my new book All Species of Knowledge. The page examines a lithograph by the voyage artist Ludwig Choris and also the way the expedition’s personnel served a strong critique of the Russian imperial project in the North Pacific. The Rurik expedition sought to find a Northwest Passage in the years 1815-1818, but it failed in this mission in the same manner as every previous attempt to locate a passage. The voyage naturalists and the artist turned failure into great success with their own production of natural history and visual ethnography once they returned to Europe. Much of the scientific knowledge they gather derived from their interactions and communications with Indigenous people.

The artist Choris was central to this success, and his volume of lithographs Voyage Pittoresque (1822) created an entirely new genre of visual expeditionary accounts. Page 99 delves into one of these lithographs: an image of a richly decorated visor used by an Aleut sea otter hunter. These decorations show how Aleut hunters encircled their prey on the water, and used spears to attack an individual otter. Surrounding this image of the hunt are depictions of whales and other sea life. Therefore, the Aleut visor itself tells a story of the hunt, and Choris’s lithograph translates this story for his European audience.

Page 99 connects this ethnographic interpretation of the visor to a larger goal of the Rurik’s naturalists. They sought to acquire knowledge from Indigenous groups because they found this knowledge valuable. At the same time, they were largely repulsed by the Russian colonial project in the North Pacific, which had severely destabilized Aleut and other Indigenous communities in the previous decades. Their private diaries and published accounts document their critique of the Russians, despite the fact they sailed on a Russian ship. Page 99 oddly, even eerily, reflects the book in that it showcases the most important archival material (a telling lithograph by the artist) and one of the key arguments regarding discovery, failure, and the ongoing work of colonialism in the Pacific world.

Learn more about All Species of Knowledge at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Ocean.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Avery Sutton's "Chosen Land"

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor and department chair in history at Washington State University. He is the author of several books on the history of American Christianity, including Double Crossed and American Apocalypse, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Pullman, Washington.

Sutton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test poses a fun and unique challenge for assessing a 650-page book. It might make more sense to look at pages 99, and also 199, and 299, but the rules are the rules!

Page 99 focuses on the life and work of Franciscan priest Junípero Serra and the creation of the California mission system. Convinced he would fulfill prophecies of mass Indigenous conversion, Serra turned north after failures in Baja and helped plan a new network of missions in Alta California, home to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already exposed to European disease. He stripped resources from southern missions to supply the new effort and celebrated early baptisms—often of sick children—as signs of divine promise, even as missionaries used aid to draw Native communities into the system. The passage also captures Serra’s extreme penitenial piety. During a sermon, he scourged himself so violently that a man imitated him and died in front of the crowd.

The larger purpose of the book is to explain why the United States looks so different from its peer nations when it comes to religion. Christianity has profoundly shaped American education, politics, economics, popular culture, and foreign policy. I argue that a godless Constitution and a First Amendment that guaranteed religious freedom did not weaken religion but supercharged it. Disestablisent encouraged religious leaders to become entrepreneurs, master new communicatin technologies, and compete aggressively for influence and authority.

The book traces 500 years of competing Christian visions and efforts to apply those visions to everyday life. I also highlight those caught in the middle, such as the Indigenous peoples Serra encountered, and the enslaved, religious minorities, and many others. Some rejected the faith that various Christians tried to impose on them; others embraced it and reshaped it into a tool of resistance, drawing on the God of Exodus to challenge the religious power structures.

This passage on page 99 matters because it shows that the effort to turn North America into God’s chosen land was not confined to the Atlantic seaboard. It stretched all the way to the Pacific. In fact, I open the book with earlier Catholic efforts in the Southwest to remind readers that the Puritans are not the beginning or source of Americans’ sense of divine mission.

Finally, I’m hoping that readers of my book will recognize that the current debates over American politics, polarization, and the culture wars are not new but have been baked into the nation from its very origins. I don’t think we can understand what’s happening in American culture today without understanding the role of religion in our past and the many ways it has been and is being used by competing groups of Americans.

Visit Matthew Avery Sutton's website.

The Page 99 Test: American Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue

Frances Courtney Kneupper's "Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400"

Frances Courtney Kneupper is an Associate Professor of History at The University of Mississippi. She has spent her scholarly career focused on the voices of the marginalized in late medieval Europe. In particular, she has studied the way that spirituality, especially heresy and prophecy, have been used to express critiques of the status quo. She has published widely on prophecy and prophetic women in the Middle Ages, addressing the topics of prophecy, gender, and authority.

Kneupper applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400: Outsiders, Women, and Reformers, with the following results:

Page 99 discusses the renowned fourteenth century holy woman Catherine of Siena’s purported ability to know the future. Specifically, page 99 focuses on the assertions of Catherine’s most enthusiastic promotor, Raymond of Capua, who claimed to have witnessed Catherine’s successful prophecies. Raymond wrote about Catherine, “She possessed the gift of prophecy in so perfect of measure that, … as far as we could see, nothing was hidden from her…” This page occurs in a chapter which examines claims of prophecy made by and on behalf of holy women in the later fourteenth century. I argue that as holy women like Catherine became more involved in public, political life, they also increasingly used the gift of prophecy to legitimize their activism and political interventions. Prophecy became an entry point for women who did not have access to conventional authority to nevertheless exert unprecedented influence and power.

This page successfully reflects the overall enterprise of my book, which considers the crisis of authority in the late fourteenth century and the consequent debate over the gift of prophecy. As conventional authorities became mired in contention, new types of people, previously marginalized, began to speak on behalf of God. Among these, laywomen such as Catherine of Siena (and other lesser-known women) forged careers as activists and reformers. Although they encountered resistance, the new “prophets” were remarkably successful at commanding authority and moving the levers of power.

From a wider view, my book uses cases such as Catherine’s to demonstrate that the enigmatic gift of prophecy was utilized by non-elites and their supporters to successfully challenge the status quo and change the rules about who could speak on behalf of God. This book offers a detailed picture of the debates that existed in the Late Middle Ages, while also exploring matters of truth, gender, and authority that continue to impact balances of power today.

Who can know the will of God? Who has the authority to speak on His behalf? These questions have sparked debate from the earliest days of Christianity to the present moment. The questions were especially contentious in the late fourteenth century, when individuals who had previously been barred from positions of authority now used the gift of prophecy to influence politics and society. This is the heart of my book – studying the controversies that erupted as various previously excluded individuals professed to know divine will. One especially remarkable discovery is the successful argument made by both women and men that God had turned His back on clerics and now offered His divine wisdom exclusively to women, who, because of their humility and perceived lower status, had replaced men as the spiritually chosen.

Learn more about Prophecy and the Battle for Spiritual Authority, 1360–1400 at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Garrett Peck's "The Bright Edges of the World"

Garrett Peck is an author, historian, and tour guide in Santa Fe, specializing in adventure travel and historic and cultural interpretation. He leads the Willa Cather’s Santa Fe tour, teaches stargazing, and leads many other tours.

The author of nine books about American history, Peck’s latest is The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop. The book explores Cather’s travels to the Southwest that inspired her to write her “best book” (her words), Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Peck applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Bright Edges of the World and shared the following:

Page 99 of my Willa Cather book is a half-page of text, while the other half is a 1926 image of the Santa Fe Plaza with the St. Francis Cathedral in the background. It has a large number of black Ford Model Ts along the street, a reminder how the automobile became so widespread and affordable in the 1920s. On this page I wrote about the character of Santa Fe and the prevalence of Catholicism:

Santa Fe is a deeply Catholic city. It wasn’t uncommon in the early twentieth century to see nuns and priests walking about. The Catholic Church had a significant presence downtown. St. Francis Cathedral stands a block east of the Plaza, and just to the south were two Catholic parochial schools: Our Lady of Light Academy, the girls school known to most as the Loretto Academy, and St. Michael’s College for boys.

This is a pretty good measure of my book. Although Cather wasn’t Catholic, she wrote about two Catholic priests on the American frontier in the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop, and so I wanted to create a sense of the Catholic presence in Santa Fe in my book. Cather was inundated with Catholic fan mail after the book came out in September 1927 (they are collected in a thick folder at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln Libraries archive). She couldn’t respond to all these letters, so she penned an open letter to Commonweal magazine addressing their many questions about a book that she later called her “best book.” Her letter is a fabulous primary source that explained so much of what went into her novel.

My book, The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, is a history of Cather’s “best book.” As I’m a tour guide in Santa Fe, I focused on Cather’s travels to the Southwest and how much that inspired her fiction. I wrote the book conversationally to appeal to a wide range of readers, including those who want to go “a-journeying in New Mexico on the trail of the Archbishop,” as Cather wrote.

Visit Garrett Peck's website.

Garrett Peck's best books about Prohibition.

Writers Read: Garrett Peck (January 2010).

The Page 99 Test: The Prohibition Hangover.

The Page 99 Test: Capital Beer.

The Page 99 Test: A Decade of Disruption.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas's "When the Good Life Goes Bad"

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Ethics and Society at Vanderbilt University and has served as the executive director of both the Society of Christian Ethics, the Black Religious Scholars Group and is co-founder of the Society of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion. She has published ten books including Religion, Race, and COVID-19: Confronting White Supremacy in the Pandemic and The Altars Where We Worship: The Religious Significance of Popular Culture.

Floyd-Thomas applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, When the Good Life Goes Bad: The US and Its Seven Deadly Sins, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Understanding pride as the doctrinal dimension of the American good life is essential for distinguishing between the projections and shadows that myths cast. The American discipline of education and schooling produces knowledge that shapes what Americans consider to be good. In short, American education has long indoctrinated Americans to accept social and cultural norms (aka assumptions and lies) about themselves and others as fact. Pride or “knowledge without character” is the process by which Americans presume and impose the supremacy of their worldview to the exclusion of all others. Through an analysis of knowledge production and dissemination, this chapter explores the ways in which the privileged perspectives of some become the normalizing process by which the general public comes to believe in these death- dealing ideologies as they order our world.

In Christocentric terms, pride is the pinnacle of human hubris, whereby we focus on our own ability, an ability often rooted in delusions of grandeur. Where Hebrews 11:1 articulates that Christian faith is trusting in the divine, pride substitutes our own self-aggrandizing feats and self- serving facts as the source of the “assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” Philosopher David Hume assesses pride as a pleasant sensation and humility as a painful one. Many wise people have deemed pride to be the greatest of sins. Specifically, American pride emanates from American nationalism and the alleged magnanimity of the United States as a first world power. Many in the world regard the United States as a country proud in the extreme and profoundly lacking in national self-awareness. Take, for example, “Make America Great Again” as a political motto whose adherents exhibit their reluctance or inability to learn moral lessons from past great empires and to gauge its historical significance relative to them. American pride is founded upon Gandhi’s blunder of “knowledge without character.”

Rather than doing the hard work of gaining an enlightened, historically informed understanding of their nation, Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that self-knowledge is more about trusting their feelings of superiority, whether based on nationality, race, gender, sexuality, class, or ability. As a result, the goal of establishing and advancing common ideals such as fellowship, freedom, and flourishing is ignored. In short, America’s system of knowledge production privileges the national functionality of its citizens to the detriment of their national character and moral formation. The rising intolerance in the United States for critical reflection and analysis has coddled the American mind and compromised its ability to search for wisdom and to question untruths.

Page 99 appears in a chapter that frames “pride” as a doctrinal dimension of the American good life.

The core of the text is actually revealed on this page! A browser opening to page 99 would get a good idea of what When the Good Life Goes Bad is doing. The book is a theological and moral critique of the stories that shape American identity, and page 99 shows the engine of that critique: pride as “knowledge without character,” where confidence outruns wisdom and inherited assumptions get treated as fact. It also captures how I read culture as formation. Education and “knowledge production” are not neutral; they can function like catechesis, training citizens into “normal” ways of seeing and then baptizing those perspectives as universal.

I write as a theologian listening to public life. Scripture and moral philosophy sit beside the everyday habits that form us—what we celebrate, what we ignore, what we call “common sense.” If page 99 resonates, it may be because you recognize the feeling it names: certainty that isn’t wisdom, confidence that isn’t character. The page also signals a Christocentric contrast. Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as trust oriented toward God; pride replaces that trust with self-aggrandizing achievements, national myths, and self-serving “facts,” producing a certainty that resists correction. Readers will also see that this pride is not merely personal. It is communal and political—bound up with nationalism, privilege, and the way one group’s worldview becomes the standard by which everyone else is measured.

What page 99 cannot supply, on its own, is the book’s full architecture: how pride interlocks with other “shadows” cast by the American good life, how these ideologies take on everyday force, and how the argument turns toward moral formation and hope. Even so, as a browser’s shortcut, the Page 99 Test works well here.

If page 99 hooks you, the rest of the book shows why that diagnosis matters. I follow the American good life’s promises—fellowship, freedom, flourishing—and then track what those promises can conceal: exclusion, domination, and a growing intolerance for critical reflection that coddles the mind and dulls our capacity for wisdom. Along the way, I ask questions that refuse easy answers: Who benefits when nostalgia becomes moral authority? What happens when superiority feels like self-knowledge? The text helps us realize that we live in a time of gaslighting—public gaslighting. A time when the obvious is denied. When facts are treated as opinions. When propaganda is called patriotism. When cruelty is called “strength.” When greed is called “freedom.” When lies are called “just asking questions.” In such a world, faith must become more than comfort. Faith must become clarity. Or otherwise, faith becomes synonymous for lying.

Alas, this is not a book that settles for scolding or despair. It presses toward an alternative moral imagination: humility in place of hubris, historically informed self-awareness in place of myth, and character formed for the common good rather than national functionality. Page 99 gives you the thesis in sharp relief; the chapters that follow trace its consequences—and invite readers to imagine a good life that does not have to go bad.

Learn more about When the Good Life Goes Bad at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patricia Seed's "Sails and Shadows"

Patricia Seed is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the award-winning author of To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico; American Pentimento: The Invention of Indians and the Pursuit of Riches; and Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Sails and Shadows: How the Portuguese Opened the Atlantic and Launched the Slave Trade, with the following results:

This page focuses on the Portuguese explorer of Africa’s Atlantic coast, Diogo Cão. Despite being little known outside of Portugal his contemporaries viewed his voyages as a far more important than Barthlomew Dias’s because Cão was the first European to successfully sail south of the Equator, that is, without the help of a pole star. Furthermore, the page illustrates the common Portuguese tactic of ingratiating themselves with leaders of very wealthy African kingdoms, in this example, with the Congo. Their goals were twofold: to convert the leadership to Christianity and to establish an ongoing commercial relationship including cooperation with the slave trade.

Page 99 may surprise readers, who expected that any Portuguese encounter with Africans would result in the latter being deliberately harmed. Yet nothing of the sort happened in Congo. Far from altruism, Diogo Cão’s politeness sought to entice Congo elites into an orbit in which they would exploit or enslave other Africans in return for wealth the Portuguese could supply. Readers might view this information as creation of a web of complicity.

Much of the book explains how the Portuguese finally managed to cross the mid-Atlantic and return, a feat that had eluded sailors for thousands of years. Although Norsemen had briefly island-hopped across the northern rim, knowledge of the Americas remained hidden from Europeans and Africans until the breakthrough Portuguese voyages of the 1400s.

Learn more about Sails and Shadows at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

L. Archer Porter's "Homebodies"

Archer Porter interrogates the social, cultural, and economic life of performance in digital culture. She holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from UCLA and Masters from UNC-Greensboro. In her first monograph, Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, Porter examines the politics of everyday media production by amateur performers, grounded in the study of thousands of home dance videos online. Outputs of her research have been published in Documenta, Performance Research Journal, communication +1, International Journal of Screendance, Bloomsbury Handbook on Dance and Philosophy, and Etúdes. Porter is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre Arts & Dance at the University of Texas at Arlington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Homebodies and shared the following:

On page 99 of Homebodies: Performance and Intimacy in the Age of New Media, I describe how Instagram users maintain multiple accounts to brand themselves differently for different audiences, and how dance supports those brand distinctions. This discussion appears midway through the second chapter on “the dancing selfie,” a media form whose aesthetics and semiotics make clear that the dancer is recording themselves. Two dancers whose home dance videos I analyze earlier in the chapter reappear here, and their posts and profiles continue to serve as tools for unpacking the choreographies of intimacy and circulations of authenticity in digital culture. By considering their Instagram accounts as a whole on this page, I suggest how each dancer crafts a personal brand through the dancing body, domestic space, and autobiographical narrative, all organized into a coherent aesthetic.

Page 99 is a representative snapshot of Homebodies, particularly in how it foregrounds the neoliberal co-optation of the dancing body on social media—a central concern of my theory of intimaesthetics. This theory names the aestheticization of intimacy in Web 2.0, especially through self-produced media that stage interior life, private space, and personal narrative. On platforms like Instagram, however, home dance videos play directly into systems that harvest intimate data and refashion the person as a product for the capitalist marketplace. In the book’s introduction, I draw on Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello to critique the “sophisticated ergonomics” of neoliberal capitalism in new media, showing how these systems tap into the most interior dimensions of subjectivity and convert them into marketable forms. Personal branding on social media is a key expression of this process.

The discussion on page 99 demonstrates this dynamic by focusing on the everyday, choreographic manifestations of the “new spirit of capitalism” online. It shows how home dancers produce media that reflect and refine their personal brands, and how platforms actively encourage and reward this crafting of persona. In this sense, the page functions as a concise portrait of intimaesthetics as a whole.

The reference to two dancers who have honed the practice of the dancing selfie also signals a more structural feature of the book. Each chapter centers on just two home dance videos, which I analyze closely to trace their choreographic mechanisms, media genealogies, and platform politics. This deliberate focus counters social media’s overabundance of images and its corresponding lack of critical attention to the aesthetic regimes it creates and promulgates.

What page 99 cannot fully convey, however, is the book’s sustained attention to the body and its framing. Throughout Homebodies, I engage in choreographic analysis to show how intimacy is produced and how it enters different circuits of circulation. A dancer might cultivate closeness by closing his eyes and drifting in and out of frame, as if unaware of the camera—an image that circulates as privacy with a surveillance aesthetic. Or he might dance in the kitchen with a mop, as if pausing from household labor. Whatever the scene, movement, or framing, Homebodies treats choreographic intimacy as the anchor for its social, cultural, and economic life on the platform.

Visit Archer Porter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Yonatan Green's "Rogue Justice"

Yonatan Green is an Israeli-American attorney and an author, most recently a Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for the Constitution. He co-founded and was Executive Director of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum.

Green applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Rogue Justice: The Rise of Judicial Supremacy in Israel, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rogue Justice closes out my theoretical discussion of the dominant form of statutory interpretation in Israel, called “Objective Purposive Interpretation” (or “OPI”). Under this novel method, judges can apply a statute according to what its purpose ought to be, in their own estimation – really. The page includes a quote from renowned Prof. Stanley Fish critiquing OPI (“you have broken free of any and all constraints on what you then declare the law to be”), and summarizes a central flaw of this interpretive method – that it explicitly enables courts to make binding decisions based on “the entirely personal and prejudiced moral ideology of each and every judge.” I finish the section by writing: “The use of OPI renders legislation meaningless, legislators powerless, and the legislative process futile.” The page then continues on to another section, in which I examine a striking and perplexing similarity between Justice Aharon Barak (pioneer of OPI), and Justice Antonin Scalia (paragon of judicial restraint and textualism).

I think the Page 99 Test works for my book – partially. Rogue Justice is an analytical, scholarly, rigorous critique of the Israeli legal system, and especially of the doctrines developed by the Israeli Supreme Court over the past four decades. This page sums up the overall critique against one of the core pillars of Israeli judicial supremacy – a wild and unparalleled form of statutory interpretation, which openly flouts legal, democratic and linguistic norms and which grants judges unrivaled governing power. Much of the book involves a serious principled and theoretical examination of the Court’s doctrines, and this page shows the tail-end of such a discussion. The page refers to a well-known expert, reflecting the book’s spirit because so much of the book endeavors to present the critiques of prominent legal scholars, and not solely my own views. One might fairly say that more than anything else, this book compiles a vast array of arguments advanced by leading legal figures against the Israeli Court’s supremacist jurisprudence.

The last sentence quoted above (in the page description), which closes the section, reflects my effort that the book be accessible, readable and enjoyable – I try and condense core arguments into memorable zingers which pack a punch (and are no less true for it). As I continue to the next section, I raise a point of interest to American readers (Scalia vs. Barak), and this too reflects an overall goal of the book, bridging the gap between a far-off jurisdiction and a foreign non-Israeli audience. Further, I think the section (albeit in the next page) makes a non-intuitive and nuanced argument (namely, that Barak and Scalia reach the same conclusion but for completely opposite and contradictory reasons), something which the book does quite often.

The page is missing two significant elements. First, throughout the book I regularly refer to real-life examples and to judicial decisions. This is missing from the current page, making the book seem more theoretical and less practical than it really is. Second, the page has very few endnote references, which is unusual – the book is supported by a vast array of sources and notes, meticulously researched, which typically adorn (and sometimes crowd) every page. Indeed, a key emphasis of my book is how much the granular details matter. In that sense, the very notion of a single page capturing the book’s “essence” is, by definition, contrary to the book’s essential claim. Nonetheless, I think this page provides a useful and not-misleading glimpse into Rogue Justice, its style, and its substance.

Visit Yonatan Green's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Patti M. Marxsen's "Karen Blixen’s Search for Self"

Patti M. Marxsen is an essayist, biographer, independent scholar, and translator (FR>EN) whose writings have been published in the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean. She is the author of three biographical studies, two essay collections, a collection of short fiction, and numerous articles and reviews related to visual art and Haitian literature.

Her books include Helene Schweitzer: A Life of Her Own and Jacques Roumain: A Life of Resistance.

Marxsen applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Karen Blixen's Search for Self: The Making of "Out of Africa" (LSU Press), with the following results:

Page 99 of my book proves the astute observation of Ford Madox Ford to be true in many ways. On that page, I begin with the fact that animals are everywhere in Karen Blixen’s famous memoir of her idealized African world. In that sense, Out of Africa echoes her idyllic early childhood in nineteenth-century Denmark where “dogs, horse, and birds were ever-present.”

This gets complicated, however, when Blixen compares Black African people to animals … as she does, throughout her book, with statements such as, “The old dark clear-eyed Native of Africa, and the old dark clear-eyed Elephant, they are alike.” For this she has been criticized by post-colonial scholars who read her animal metaphors as evidence of racism since racism was, clearly, built into the framework of British Colonialism and she was, in fact, a colonizer by choice. Yet when neither species is deliberately diminished—as in the example of a wise old elephant—another perspective emerges that goes to heart of a current culture debate that dares to question human superiority as the basis of modern “humanism” vs. the wisdom of the animal world as an essential aspect of what many scholars refer to as “post-humanism.” As Danish scholar Peter Mortensen points out, Karen Blixen’s unique vision represents one of the early examples of “post-humanism” because it recognizes a necessary balance of human/animal interaction.

This issue is one of several that emerges in my book as I offer a twenty-first-century reading of a twentieth-century classic, beginning with a “deep dive” into how Karen Blixen thought and lived with issues of colonialism, racism, and feminism in a section titled “Contested Legacy.” I also untangle a kind of “identity theft” in that section with regard the blockbuster film in 1985 that posthumously romanticizes Blixen’s difficult life.

I find it fascinating that one page of a book can serve as a kind of “on ramp” to the many complex issues I explore through the lens of a memoir first published in 1937. That said, I would argue that a true understanding of Karen Blixen’s life and work requires several angles of vision—and many more pages.

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--Marshal Zeringue