She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women's Generational Sonic Rhetorics, and reported the following:
You’ll find one of the key arguments of not only the third chapter but also of the whole book on page 99. Here, I discuss an important difference between having a name imposed onto one’s self and having to find ways that speak back to the name’s connotations. This chapter begins by discussing how names work to grant or take away power as well as agency. Page 99 specifically addresses how that kind of “naming by un-naming” has been used in America’s social, cultural, and economic histories to undermine Black women and, in effect, promote racist stereotypes.Learn more about From Blues to Beyoncé at the SUNY Press website.
This unpacking of names is only the beginning though. To really understand the chapter, and book more broadly, readers should move beyond page 99. The larger argument of the chapter focuses on the ways Black women music artists speak back to the problematic philosophical understanding of “Black folks being out of time”-- as in not having a history—which we know is false.
While page 99 demonstrates a fragment of topics discussed in this book, it does prove to be a pretty useful soundbite. Readers will get a fairly good idea of my writing style, at the very least, and, at most, get a sense of how I recenter Black women in some of the more common discussions swirling around in pop culture: Is Beyoncé a feminist? What’s changed for Black women in music since vinyl records? Why should I read celebrity autobiographies? Of course page 99 doesn’t answer these specific questions, but the discussion on that page may help reader be open to thinking about those answers in new ways.
--Marshal Zeringue
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