
Eckstein applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sound Tactics: Auditory Power in Political Protests, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book opens within a case study of HU Resist, a student activist group at Howard University, at a moment of intensification. It documents their shift from a localized student protest to a broader civic movement, interweaving historical resonance, digital amplification, and material solidarity. On this page, readers encounter HU Resist not merely as agitators but as archivists of Black student resistance, building an audiovisual, participatory infrastructure grounded in both community and critique. Their tactical soundwork—chanting, video, and responsive surveying—creates a scene of deliberative listening as much as vocal protest. The page concludes as a financial aid embezzlement scandal breaks, layering institutional critique atop historical commemoration.Learn more about Sound Tactics at the Penn State University Press website.
The page does not function as an uncanny synecdoche of the book, but it does pulse with its dominant rhythms. A browser landing here would glimpse the book’s commitments: a study of how student sound and speech shape publics, how institutions get narrated from their margins, and how protest reorganizes the auditory. Yet, absent is the theoretical scaffolding that situates HU Resist within broader arguments about heckling, voicing, and institutional aurality. Without that framework, one might misread the work as primarily ethnographic rather than rhetorical. Still, it is a good shortcut—just not a complete one.
The HU Resist case sits at the heart of the book’s wager: that sound—both as noun and adjective—offers a tactical vocabulary for those operating under constraint. Sound as a noun refers to the material vibrations that are heard and felt; sound as an adjective connotes practical judgment, a sense of fittingness within a given situation. Earlier in the chapter, HU Resist had discovered the improvisational force of the heckle, using it during a campus convocation to call out institutional complicity. When the financial aid scandal surfaced, they recalibrated, turning to Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” as a sonic indictment of administrative failure. Their ability to pivot, remix, and reframe in response to evolving institutional conditions exemplifies the logic of “sound tactics”: using auditory presence to reorganize what counts as sayable, audible, and actionable within public space.
HU Resist exemplifies the book’s broader claim: that protest sound is not ambient noise but deliberate, moral argument. Across case studies—from student walkouts to urban casseroles—Sound Tactics theorizes how constrained groups use auditory forms to render demands urgent, affectively charged, and institutionally disruptive. These are not just sounds; they are sound judgments. Protesters deploy pitch, rhythm, and repetition as rhetorical resources that compel recognition
--Marshal Zeringue