Douglas Dowland's "We, Us, and Them"

Douglas Dowland is Associate Professor of English at Ohio Northern University and the author of Weak Nationalisms: Affect and Nonfiction in Postwar America.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, We, Us, and Them: Affect and American Nonfiction from Vietnam to Trump, and reported the following:

Much of my research focuses around synecdoche: the rhetorical tactic of substituting a part for a whole. This makes the Page 99 Test all the more fascinating to me, as it’s an exercise in synecdoche itself. Can page 99 give the reader an idea of a book overall? Can one page speak for an entire book?

For mine, the answer is, yes, I believe so! On page 99 of We, Us, and Them, you’ll find me winding down a chapter focused on the writer James Baldwin. What I’ve tried to do throughout the book is offer a counterintuitive narrative to our understanding of several American authors. Earlier in the book, I explored how John Steinbeck’s enthusiasm for the Vietnam War was derived mostly from his importing of the American story onto South Vietnam. I also explored how Hunter S. Thompson’s bilious reading of America was not so much driven by a countercultural impulse but more by good old-fashioned populism.

By page 99, I’ve finished perhaps my most counterintuitive move. For the previous twenty pages, I explore a book by James Baldwin that almost all critics have dismissed, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. My argument is that critics simply missed the point of the book – to them, Baldwin had written poorly and betrayed his legacy. But to me, Baldwin’s book is not a disaster but a conclusion: going farther, it is Baldwin’s stepping away from the premises of both his reputation and of his decades-long insistence that justice could be done, that African-Americans could be treated as equals in the United States. My thesis is that he realizes the futility of America as a nation and that his book is a practice in the art of futility. His giving up is thus exactly the point that critics miss, if only because it pulls from under their feet the idea of what I call “James Baldwin,” not so much the man, but the reputation white critics built for him.

Thus I write on page 99:

What if [Baldwin] is no longer interested in seeking to reason with white critics or white people, or whiteness altogether? What if he no longer cares if he has produced ample reasons that justify his anger to critics, or expended energy appealing to the decent and humane when those appeals go perpetually unenacted? What if he does not want to be together with us? And, ultimately, what if he no longer believes that white America, or America entirely, is worthy of his patience, his intellect, his identity, or his voice?

To me, Baldwin’s book is an “affective exit from America. It is a rejection of loyalty to the nation that does not nurture but only threatens him.”

All said, there is much that can be derived from page 99, and that itself says something about the power of synecdoche. In my book, it’s a page that gets to the point of the book entire – that how authors write about America reveal the strong affects at work in their depictions, we see the presumptions and frustrations that emerge when they employ three deceptively simple words: we, us, and them.

Learn more about We, Us, and Them at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue