Communication. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism, winner of the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research, and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, winner of the Information Science Book of the Year Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Dunbar-Hester applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Oil Beach is in the chapter on sea otters in Southern California, which surveys the last few decades in these otters’ longer arc from pelt-bearing commodities to charismatic objects of conservation. (The book’s four chapters each concern a different life form that lives in or passes through San Pedro Bay, focusing on birds, bananas, otters, and cetaceans.)Visit Christina Dunbar-Hester's website.
Page 99 actually contains one of my favorite quotes in the whole book, from a 1999 Los Angeles Times story about the local aquarium’s inauguration of its otter exhibit. Its author wrote:A little girl named Summer arrived in Long Beach last month with what sounds like a Hollywood crisis: a lousy fur coat, a weight problem and a dependency issue. Summer, an 11-month-old sea otter at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, also would be distressed to know she’s missing her spot in the limelight. This Saturday the aquarium will launch Sea Otter Summer, but the budding diva will be in rehab.When I say “favorite” here, I don’t mean that I necessarily like this quote. It’s rather unsettling how the reporter equates an orphaned otter who probably suffered pollution or environmental injury to a Hollywood celebrity in rehab. (As I explain on page 99, aquarium handlers knew the young otter’s so-called “addiction” to suckling towels “was an unfortunate effect of her separation from her mother when she was only one week old...”) Nonetheless it’s evocative and placeful, as it attempts to “translate” the struggling otter by way of a Los Angeles trope, and anthropomorphizes her to enroll the reader into caring about her (while also, true to Hollywood, making a spectacle of her).
In making an otter’s life history interchangeable with a Hollywood stereotype, the quote inadvertently gets at some of what I’m trying to do in the book: to provide an “unnatural history” of arguably one of the most incredibly manipulated, managed places on earth, the Los Angeles coastline in San Pedro Bay. The aquarium is a striking setting: it showcases marine ecologies of the Pacific Ocean, and it tries to offer a “good life” to a struggling wild animal who’s a member of a heavily managed, endangered population; but it’s built on infilled “land” literally created by pouring concrete in the estuarial LA River mouth, using revenue generated by the Los Angeles- Long Beach container ports and oil drilling.
So the mise-en-scène of Oil Beach, in all its messy contradictions, is at least hinted in this page. At the same time, I’m not sure the page-99 description of the otter’s life at the aquarium gives the reader much preview of the analysis of the book. But it does foreshadow major themes of multispecies life and death, and the entanglement of industrial infrastructure and spaces for living; and evokes place in a meaningful way.
The Page 99 Test: Hacking Diversity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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