N. Katherine Hayles's "Bacteria to AI"

N. Katherine Hayles is distinguished research professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of literature at Duke University. She is the author of many books, most recently Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational.

Hayles applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with our Nonhuman Symbionts, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Bacteria to AI, readers will encounter speculations about how future interactions with humans and machines will evolve. The main interlocutors on this page are biologist Lynn Margulis (and her son Dorion Sagan) and environmentalist James Lovelock. Margulis and Sagan write that “the future of our machines . . . is less bleak than that of ourselves,” whereas Lovelock envisions a utopian future when intelligent machines, having become “entirely free of human commands because they will have evolved from code written by themselves,” nevertheless will be eager to enlist humans in a grand effort to keep the Earth cool. These are two different versions of what I call “technosymbiosis,” the idea that the evolutionary trajectories of humans and intelligent machines will be from now on inextricably entangled with one another. I call Lovelock’s rosy prediction “wistful,” because it seems highly unlikely, given the anthropogenic global warming that we have already seen, that intelligent machines will suddenly decide they want humans as cooperative partners. It is far more likely, I say, that they will try to exterminate humans as soon as possible.

Turning from the risky game of prediction to what we already know, I point out that technosymbiosis, the symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent machines, implies each is interdependent with the other. This means that human decisions are already penetrated at multiple levels with algorithmic calculations, that human agency, far from being “free,” is now entwined with AI in multiple arenas, and human practices are joined together with both nonhuman organisms and intelligent machines in what I call “cognitive assemblages,” collectivities through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. I end the page by alluding to the different forms of embodiment that participants in cognitive assemblages possess: enfleshed bodies for humans, nonhuman bodies with different cognitive capacities than humans, and sensors, actuators and computational media for intelligent machines.

The Page 99 Test works well for Bacteria to AI. It articulates one of the book’s major themes, the emergence of technosymbiosis; the chapter of which it is a part expands on these ideas, showing where technosymbiosis overlaps with previous theories as well as where it departs from them.

The book’s main purpose is to criticize the belief that humans are the dominant species on the planet because of our superior cognition. It draws connections between this belief and our present multiple environmental crises; regarding ourselves as superior, we humans conclude we are entitled to exploit earth’s resources for ourselves, regardless of the cost to the environment and our future prospects for survival. It draws on my previous work to distinguish sharply between cognition and consciousness, noting that conscious creatures are a tiny minority of living beings on earth; most organisms are nonconscious. This does not prevent them, however, from having cognitive capacities. Indeed, I argue that all living creatures possess some cognitive abilities, even plants and microorganisms such as bacteria. Re-imagining our cognition in relation both to nonhumans and to AI is thus an urgent necessity.

The alternative I offer is the Integrated Cognitive Framework, or ICF. ICF contextualizes different kinds of cognition according to the umwelten from which they arise. “Umwelt,” roughly translated as “world surround,” is German biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s term to describe the different worlds that species construct for themselves. No entity, including humans, can see reality “objectively”; each species builds its world through its specific cognitive, sensory and physical abilities, including the worlds that computational media construct through their affordances. Learning about and respecting the umwelten of other biological species and AI—our nonhuman symbionts-- will be crucially important to our human futures.

Learn more about Bacteria to AI at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Keith Richotte Jr.'s "The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told"

Keith Richotte Jr. is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples and Policy Program, Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and Chief Justice of the Spirit Lake Appellate Court; and he never thought he would ever have this many jobs at once.

Richotte applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As we have seen, the Supreme Court has been, shall we say, less than rigorous in identifying a specific constitutional source of federal authority over Native America. To that end, on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has simply asserted that the U.S. Constitution as a whole is the source of federal authority with little if any reference to specific provisions within the document. … It might be tempting to dismiss McLean’s opinion as an outlier, especially as it was not really in keeping with how we understand the law either then or now. But it is nonetheless helpful because it is evidence of a pattern: on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has asserted that the authority being claimed over Native America is authorized under the U.S. Constitution as a self-evident truism.

If I happened to overhear the Page 99 Test telling a friend about my book using its methodology, I would not be compelled to jump in and correct the Test. Rather, I would be amused at how quickly and simply the Test both cuts to the bone of the argument and hints at the relaxed, familiar, and even humorous way the book makes that argument.

What authority does the federal government hold over Native America? More importantly, how does it justify the authority that it claims? Does this justification comport with its claims over its citizenry more generally? What consequences do the answers to these questions hold for Native America?

These questions fuel The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told. The Page 99 Test reveals much of the heart of the book: the answers to these questions provided by the Supreme Court are not particularly satisfactory. By examining the justifications for federal authority through an Indigenous perspective, it becomes clear that the Supreme Court is trying to tell what amounts to a trickster story – but it is the worst one ever told.

Why is it the worst trickster story ever told and what can we do about it?

Please read the book to find out.

Learn more about The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Friedman's "Carceral Apartheid"

Brittany Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. Her current work examines this in the realm of social control, and the underside of government such as prisons, courts, and treasuries. Friedman is considered a pathbreaking scholar producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society, and author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Carceral Apartheid and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons takes us on the journey of the second Great Migration, where generations of Black families have fled white supremacist violence in the U.S. South, hoping to find refuge in California. Yet, upon arrival they continued to experience more racism, which in some cases radicalized the liberatory politics of West Coast Black communities. I write on page 99:

Black families who had fled the South were left feeling disillusioned. Their hopes and dreams for a better life elsewhere were revealed to be simply unattainable due to the same racialized violence they had endured for generations.

Particularly for the younger cohort, joining Black revolutionary struggles in California became a way to fight back against new versions of the same carceral apartheid that their families fled in the Southern states. During the time that I first met Anthony, I also began to connect with several members of Black political organizations who joined in the 1960s.

Through this network I met Avery, a high-ranking leader in the original Black Panther Party who explained to me in an interview this sentiment in the context of Oakland, California:

Oakland is probably very much the ideal place because Oakland had been an all White city up until the forties, 1940s, when, during the second Great Migration, Blacks came to Oakland, as they did to Chicago, whatever, from the south…So, Oakland went from being a white city to an almost half Black City, in like one generation. In the south, where you had the main part of the movement; where the majority of Black people had been living, the Whites were so violent and vicious…Now, why is that important?

Because, who joins the Black Panther Party are the people who are living in the North because they are already disconnected from the Klan, so they don’t have that fear; they don’t have that fear of the Klan. But, now they have a consciousness; who is going to let somebody…

Surprisingly, page 99 captures deeply a key takeaway from my book that explains why the Black Freedom Movement holds a significant place in California history. This page also showcases the power of life history interviews and how Carceral Apartheid weaves lived experiences with clear theorizing throughout the book’s storytelling, a writing style often found in creative non-fiction.

Overall, the test works for my book in so much that page 99 displays a key takeaway from Carceral Apartheid. The generation of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for liberation and organized major social movement groups against carceral apartheid were a unique generation in terms of many being the children of Black people fleeing the Ku Klux Klan dominated South, with the promise of a new life. When they instead encountered a similar pattern of alliances between emerging white supremacist groups and the police in California, both in society and within prisons, they fought back every step of the way.

So even though the Page 99 Test only captures a portion of my book’s main argument, it does reveal several of my book’s strengths. Notably, my use of original interviews with people who catalyzed organized resistance to the system of oppression that I term “carceral apartheid,” the system I trace as a violent through-line of colonial and postcolonial governance designed to decimate, destroy, and divide political opposition.

Visit Brittany Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew C. Halteman's "Hungry Beautiful Animals"

Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in the UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.

His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, is a heartfelt, humane, and humorous exploration of how going vegan can bring abundance into our lives.

Halteman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hungry Beautiful Animals and reported the following:

Page 99:

[Or parrying writer’s block] with a furious elliptical run to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’” Or bracing for a workday that might otherwise elicit one-finger salutes to all comers by lingering in a hug from a loved one. Ah, the calming effects of oxytocin!

Managing our inner ecologies can be mighty difficult too. Like when your heart blissfully ignores both your gut and your head as a toxic relationship sends you careening toward implosion. Or when a month of poorly managed work travel transports you predictably from Lonely Valley throughout Booze Gulch onto the floor of the dingiest room at the Motel Dicey Choices. Or when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and exploring new ones as your friends look on befuddled.

To fully express our capabilities for well-being—to “flourish,” as Aristotle would say—we need relative harmony across the provinces of our territory. When we are unwell, chances are that two or more of the provinces are at war. If we want to bring peace among them, it pays to know each of them intimately—their points of strength, their weaknesses, their insecurities, which ones naturally collaborate well and which ones are temperamentally at odds. Perhaps most importantly, we must know who to approach first to start building the requisite alliances.

Here’s where the genius of Bryant’s advice to “start with the visceral” really comes home. It’s hard to imagine the beauty of a vegan world while your stomach churns at the thought of endless turnip porridge and your heart sinks into dread of the social death sentence sure to follow. Disgust and anxiety are imagination killers. If you want to open a window from our inner ecology into the beauty of a vegan world, go first and with gusto for [the gut, preferably with a superabundance of delicious food and comforting company.]

Page 99 of Hungry Beautiful Animals is as serendipitous a harbinger of what to expect from the book as I imagine any single page could be.

The first five lines offer an accurate sampling of authorial voice: we read a quippy and self-deprecating yet authoritative Gen-Xer wielding the edginess of a rude gesture and the camp of a Journey anthem to balance the glow of a sudden flood of love.

The book’s essence peers out from the first full paragraph: an opportunity to envision and enact transformational changes of our eating habits in ways that embrace and celebrate the complexity of human desire in its oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. We see that we don’t need to judge ourselves for struggling to unify our “inner ecology”—that we can fail, learn from our foibles, even laugh about them, and then aspire to go again (always imperfectly) in the direction of the beautiful vegan world that has captured our imagination.

A window into the book’s method opens in the second paragraph: to draw on philosophical traditions, East and West, ancient and contemporary, to help us align our desires with our best interests. Achieving the flourishing lives and the gorgeous world we all desire is a matter of knowing ourselves intimately enough to meet all the inner parts of ourselves where they are and invite them into joy: to make peace outside, we must first make peace inside.

The final paragraph anchors page 99 like Bryant Terry’s inspiration to “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political” anchors Hungry Beautiful Animals. To get our inner families into accord, we must put feelings before facts and assure the gut and the heart that delicious food and abiding fellowship are possible in a vegan world. Then and only then can we pivot with joy to the headwork of figuring out our unique contributions to this world-transforming work and the politics of being the change we wish to see.

As a bonus, this deference to Bryant Terry’s work at the foot of the page previews the grounding energy of Black vegan work throughout the book, which draws inspiration from Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan, Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism, and Christopher Carter’s The Spirit of Soul Food in those pivotal moments where everything is at stake.

Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Surekha Davies's "Humans: A Monstrous History"

Surekha Davies spent her childhood watching Star Trek and planning to become an astronaut. By the end of her freshman year there was no warp drive, never mind comfy starships. She became a historian of science instead, specializing in the histories of exploration, cartography, cross-cultural encounters, and monsters in the era from Columbus to Captain Cook.

Davies has a BA and an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters.

After working as a curator and as a history professor, Davies became a full-time author and speaker.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Trevor Noah, the South African comedian. The title of his autobiography, Born a Crime, encapsulates an act of administrative erasure. During the apartheid era, mixed-race relationships were illegal in South Africa, and Noah, the child of such a relationship, spent his early childhood hidden at home. The legal regime of apartheid invented monsters of invisibility: people defined in law as nonpersons, a process that made them legally excludable from society. Defining people as illegal effectively defines them as monsters: as something beyond regular categories, a threat to be suppressed. Such laws show how ideas about race and nation can operate in the same way. They fix the idea of innate differences into a system of hierarchy that justifies an unequal distribution of rights and protections.

The page then outlines a pervasive myth: that before the twentieth century, people in different countries and continents were totally separate and distinct. Myths about medieval European nations (before the sixteenth century, before European colonialism across oceans) being white, Christian, and ethnically one-dimensional fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories today. At times, European Christians in the Middle Ages (between around the seventh and the fourteenth centuries) defined Jews, Muslims, and people from different parts of Europe as monstrous. Such monstrifying stories lie at the roots of today’s debates about nationhood and citizenship.

The page’s closing alludes to less demonizing ways of defining “nation”: as community relationships, not necessarily blood relationships. Native American nations define tribal belonging in ways that differ from nation to nation. Today’s notion of citizenship as a legal category that can be fulfilled in various ways contains something of that flexible way of understanding belonging. But as we reach the end of page 99 and turn over, we’re reminded that this is not how citizenship is typically experienced in practice.

Humans: A Monstrous History ranges from antiquity to the present and roams around the world. Page 99 offers a glimpse of this: apartheid-era South Africa, eleventh-century Europe, contemporary North America. It reveals the book’s core argument: that monster-making is a process of storytelling. People often invent monsters to disappear people who show that seemingly separate categories sit on a continuum.

But page 99 doesn’t reflect the book’s breadth: science, history, politics, pop culture. And it doesn’t reflect the overall feel of the book. The page suggests that the book makes grim reading, but other pages contain comedy and wonder. Humans ranges from light-hearted material like Monsters, Inc. to harrowing stories like that of Charles Byrne, the “Irish giant” whose skeleton was displayed after his death against his wishes, to manifesto-speak about Big Tech. Some sections are utopian, like discussions of the Muppets. Some explore historical events and people; others analyze novels and movies. The test doesn’t capture the full experience of the book although it reveals a key takeaway.

The book as a whole shows how people define humans, monsters, norms, and other beings in relation to one another. Humans is structured thematically in chapters that move from earth to outer space. People invent monsters in order to define three boundaries. One lies between the human and “other stuff” – animals, gods, machines, Martians. Another is the boundary between social groups: this is how societies define and police categories of race, nation, sex, and gender. The third is the boundary of “normal”: by defining monsters, people define norms. And in order to claim that there are discrete categories, people define anyone that doesn’t fit them as an exception, a threat to be suppressed or punished, or as a monster that breaks categories. To build a better future, we might remember instead that each one of us is unique: if we are each monstrous in the sense of being wondrous, then no one is a monster.

Page 99 appears as part of a longer excerpt and author interview in The Ink.

Visit Surekha Davies's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua K. Leon's "World Cities in History"

Joshua K. Leon is a writer, and Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona University. He was awarded the 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.

His latest book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.”

Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to World Cities in History and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, World Cities in History, can tell us a lot about the savage inequalities of a point in time: the early Roman Empire and the cities that linked it together. It does not do what the rest of the book does, which is broadly explain how power worked in historic urban networks, so-called golden ages when cities expanded in scope, size, and reach.

But the page is representative of the book. We learn that this was a high period for urbanization. The urban network linking the Roman Empire consisted of 1,800 cities housing perhaps ten million people. Still, they were a minority, dominating the imperial hinterlands that fed them with, for example, grain from Egypt. We learn that local democracy had deteriorated, with a few rich people controlling urban planning through direct financing (in the form of liturgies) rather than deliberation and taxes.

On this page, a new section starts that begins discussing how the Roman Empire reached this point through force, diplomacy and myth. Augustus reconstructed the state on the national narrative written by the poet Virgil. None of it was really true, but it spoke to Augustus's revolution in urban life that he framed as a restoration to times past, down to the city's mythological founding by Trojan refugees.

In the myth, women pay dearly for the construction of their new city-state. They are abducted from rival tribes and married off in order to populate the city—because in ancient times, population was power. They were pawns in Rome’s expansion, dealt like currency in city mergers that enlarged the state. Constant wars of course reflected the recent past of the Late Republic, until the newfound stability of Augustan rule.

That was the myth. The bottom of page 99 hints at the reality of Augustus the city builder. He does not come off well. He sought to Make Rome Great Again with very real legal codes intended to restore the supposed female chastity and piety from those simpler agrarian times. Clearly, he was legislating based on myth, rather than reality, yet the human consequences of Augustus's crusading to reshape the city would have been palpable. For the vital details, you'll have to turn to page 100.

Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (2014), Americans in Waiting (2006), many influential articles on immigration and citizenship, and he is a co-author of the law school casebook, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. He has testified in Congress and served on the ABA Commission on Immigration. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Motomura applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borders and Belonging is part of Chapter Six, which addresses a key question in immigration debates: what about people without lawful status? The focus is the United States, but the discussion offers lessons for analogous debates worldwide. Chapter 6 as a whole explains why the best approach is legalization – that is, offering lawful status based on some conditions. Page 99 digs into a specific problem with legalization – that one-time legalization will do nothing to prevent the emergence of a new population of people without lawful status. Page 99 explains that one way to anticipate and address this problem is to have some sort of periodic legalization, but then I turn to the limits of this approach.

A reader who looks at page 99 will get a good glimpse of the book, but just a glimpse. Let me first explain what makes the glimpse a good one. Page 99 shows that the book is about immigration policy, and that it grapples with one of the topic’s most contentious issues, legalization (or amnesty). Page 99 also shows that the book takes on some of the conventional wisdoms shared by legalization’s proponents. In particular, page 99 expresses skepticism about the potential of legalization as a durable solution. So page 99 is like many pages in all chapters in two ways. First, page 99 delves deeper than the usual arguments. Second, it emphasizes how responsible approaches to immigration require broadening the time horizon to include both a long-term view and mustering the patience to put farsightedness into practice.

Why, then, would readers get only a limited view of Borders and Belonging by reading page 99? I wrote the book because I’ve learned, over several decades in this field, that almost all writing and thinking about immigration policy is too narrow. People with views or research on immigration often don’t see refugees as their topic. Lawyers don’t consider the work of international development economists. Immigrants’ rights activists may dismiss the concerns of Americans who feel displaced by immigration and immigrants. Borders and Belonging adopts a much broader perspective that includes issues that are rarely addressed together and yet are interwoven in reality.

So chapter 6 is about people without lawful status, but chapter 1 asks a very different question: “why national borders, and why not?” Chapter 9 examines a topic often raised but less often examined: “what does it mean to address migration’s root causes”? Chapter 10 discusses the relevance of history to the making of immigration policy today. In short, page 99 may give the impression that the book is about people without lawful status, when in fact the book weaves that topic into a complex set of interlocking questions. The answers try to be faithful to the book’s subtitle. And so the book is: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (2022).

Robbins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, and reported the following:

Well gosh! In my case the Ford Madox Ford test seems to have worked pretty well. Page 99 of Atrocity: A Literary History offers evidence from the nineteenth century to back up two key arguments of the book, both of them liable to be controversial: 1) that while racism or ethnocentrism certainly made it easier in the past for people to commit atrocities against Others or foreigners, there are plenty of atrocities in which racism was not a cause at all, indeed had nothing to do with the capacity to slaughter noncombatants, and 2) that while we think of white European populations in modern times as full of enthusiasm for atrocities committed by their armies against people of color, there have always been some (not necessarily anti-imperialist) who were horrified both by the violence and by the lies told to justify it. So-- this goes to the argument of the book as a whole--I contend that humanity does have a significant moral history, a progressive history, and this in spite of the terrible, terrible atrocities committed in modern times, atrocities (think of both the Holocaust and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023) that have made modern times seem the most violent times of all.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Abigail Ocobock is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships, and reported the following:

Page 99 launches browsers into the middle of a chapter about a group of LGBTQ+ people I call “Marriage Assumers.” The previous two chapters examine two other groups - “Marriage Embracers” and “Marriage Rejecters.” Taken together, these chapters explore variations in the marital orientations of different kinds of LGBTQ+ people.

Page 99 conveniently offers readers a brief summary of what they have already learnt about Marriage Assumers thus far in the chapter. Asking them to “pause and imagine the average Marriage Assumer for a minute,” it directs readers to imagine the following kind of LGBTQ+ person:

She came out and started dating same-sex partners after legal marriage was already possible. She always assumed that she would get legally married one day. Knowing that her relationships have marriage potential matters to her, and she has vetted her partners for marriage interest and commitment early on, making it a deal-breaker. She does not know exactly why marriage is so important to her. Instead, she feels it is “just what you do” when you love someone and are committed to them. She also wants children, and she feels strongly (but rather abstractly) that marriage is important for having them. She has been lucky enough to find a partner who feels the same way.

Having reiterated central features of a “Marriage Assumer,” page 99 then guides readers to focus on the topic of a new section on “Marital Readiness” by asking: “But how does she know when it is the right time to get married?”

By the end of the page, I have set the scene for answering that question, but have not yet delved into the data that does so. I explain that although Marriage Assumers needed to know that marriage was “on the table” from the beginning, it was usually only the front end of their relationships that progressed very quickly toward marriage, then their relationships slowed down (something I later refer to as “locking it down, then slowing it down” – p.101). Marriage Assumers moved quickly from meeting to dating and moving in together, in an effort to ensure a commitment that could put them on the track toward marriage, but then wanted to take their time to achieve particular relationship and life attributes deemed necessary for marital readiness. Marriage was regarded as the crowning achievement of their relationships; it was something they were consciously working toward, but would not rush into.

Browsers would get only a partial idea of the whole work from page 99. They would gain a general sense that it examines how LGBTQ+ people think about and do marriage. Yet relationship trajectories and “marital readiness” represent just one small part of that larger story.

Because page 99 conveniently summarizes how “Marriage Assumers” think about marriage, readers would accurately glean the way marriage is taken for granted by LGBTQ+ people who formed serious relationships after same-sex marriage was already legal, and the extent to which marriage defines their relationships. And if one had to pick a group to narrow in on, Marriage Assumers perhaps make most sense. Now marriage is legal nationwide, all LGBTQ+ people start their relationships with the option to legally marry.

But it is only by comparing across groups that readers gain important insights about the transformative impact of legal marriage on LGBTQ+ lives. Browsers might be left with an impression that same-sex relationships today are fairly indistinguishable from heterosexual ones. But they may not realize that this represents a significant transformation in same-sex relationships. And they will not understand what has been gained and lost with that change. Notably, at the very top of page 99 a run-on sentence from the previous page emphasizes “the central role that access to legal marriage plays in shifting ideas about marriage and parenting across generations.” The rest of page 99 quickly moves on to a new sub-section, but I hope a savvy reader might be alerted to ponder social change.

What I would want readers to know, that might not be possible from page 99 alone, is that Marriage Material is not just about same-sex marriage. I use the case of same-sex marriage to advance understanding of the enduring and changing meaning of marriage as an institution. I challenge the prevailing narrative in family sociology that marriage is a fundamentally weakened institution, showing how it continues to shape individual choices and behaviors in profound ways. I illustrate how marriage operates, shedding light on a variety of institutional mechanisms that work independently and in tandem for different people. Overall, I contend that marriage has had a transformative power on same-sex relationships—one that is much stronger than the power of LGBTQ+ individuals to change the meaning and practice of marriage.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Mann's "You Are My Sunshine"

Robert Mann is the author of ten books on U.S. and Louisiana political history. He was a senior aide to US senators Russell Long and John Breaux and Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. A professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University, Mann held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song, and reported the following:

Page 99 of You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song does not give the reader much insight into the history of the iconic song in my book’s subtitle. This page is devoted to Davis’s transformation from country singer to gospel music entertainer in the early 1950s, four years after the conclusion of his first term as Louisiana governor.

[Davis] surely noticed that other country artists were releasing more gospel songs. Popular acts like the Bailes Brothers and Molly O’Day had made gospel records since the late 1940s. Davis’s label, Decca, had inaugurated a “Faith Series” in March 1950 featuring gospel recordings by its top stars, including the Andrews Sisters, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley. Foley’s 1950 recording of the gospel standard “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” was a top-ten country hit in July 1950. In February 1951, Eddy Arnold’s “May The Good Lord Bless and Keep You” for RCA Victor reached number five on the country chart. And that summer, Foley released another gospel single, Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace In The Valley.” It became the first million-selling gospel record. It’s unclear how much these hits influenced Davis, but by 1951, he had gone all in. He would record almost nothing but gospel music for the next two decades. It was a brilliant decision that kept his career alive. Within a few years, as rock and roll exploded in popularity, most of the top country stars of the 1940s and early 1950s saw their careers decline. But, because he had already migrated into a new genre, Davis’s career survived and thrived.

Not only were his audiences ready for this new, dignified, upright Jimmie Davis, but his voice was well-suited for gospel. On the first recordings with the Anita Kerr Singers, Davis’s voice was pure and smooth, with a revitalized, heartfelt quality. Perhaps it was the new sparer instrumentation. Or maybe it was the support of masterful backup singers. Whatever the case, it was a fresh and appealing sound.

In re-launching his career as a singer of sacred songs, Davis was also a trailblazer. There were few major solo artists in Southern gospel. When Davis entered the field, singing groups— mostly quartets—dominated the genre. They roamed the South, performing in churches and other venues. Among the most prominent were The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Speer Family, The Blackwoods, The Statesmen, and The Sunshine Boys Quartet. For Davis, the new emphasis on gospel music boosted his waning career. The decision came with a ready audience that had followed him for years and loved gospel music as much or more than they loved country music. Those already toiling in the southern gospel field regarded his advent not as threatening competition but as an enormous compliment. “The gospel music industry profited during the 1950s from a genuine celebrity in its midst,” James R. Goff Jr. wrote of Davis in Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel.

When I began working on this book, I set out to explore the background of Louisiana’s state song, a simple lullaby that I thought Jimmie Davis wrote. At the time, I had no idea I would chronicle four decades of Louisiana political history and as many years of country music history, all through the lens of this iconic song.

Here's the book’s bottom line: Davis didn’t write “Sunshine,” but the song was the foundation of his remarkable political career as well as vital to the growth and respectability of hillbilly music, what we now know as country music. “Sunshine” and other seminal hillbilly songs helped give the nascent musical genre respectability by crossing over into popular music when stars like Bing Crosby and other non-hillbilly artists recorded them in the early and mid-1940s. It was one of the main reasons for Davis's induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1972.

“Sunshine” was also vital to Davis’s political success in the 1940s and 1960s. It helped him become Louisiana’s governor twice. That’s because “Sunshine” and other hit songs like it allowed him to overcome and obscure the fact that he had made a series of bawdy Blues records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those songs -- with names like “Bed Bug Blues,” “High Behind Blues,” “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” and “She’s a Hum Dum Dinger from Dingersville” -- threatened to derail his embryonic political career. But the wholesomeness of his popular, trademark song overwhelmed all that and blunted his opponents’ attacks.

Although he didn’t write “Sunshine,” it’s impossible to appreciate the song’s cultural and political significance unless you understand Davis, his personality, artistry, and long and colorful political career.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's "Making the Human"

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is located in the early pages of chapter four, which focuses on public discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to anti-Asian racism. Global catastrophes like pandemics often create a widespread sense of public panic and uncertainty. They shake social senses of security and normalcy, and as a result, not only do scientists search for solutions but a number of public narratives emerge to make sense of them as well. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the U.S. witnessed the overtly racist narrative that Asian and Asian American communities were to blame for spreading the virus, as well as public criticism that the U.S. was handling the pandemic like a “Third World country” or “failed state.” While criticism of the U.S. pandemic response is certainly warranted, this particular comparison nevertheless illustrated that the pandemic had scandalized a widespread public assumption: that “First World” nations like the U.S. are immune to these devastating disease and viral outbreaks, often imagined to be confined to faraway Asian and African countries. Page 99 discusses how these narratives function, illustrating how many public discourses around COVID-19 attempted to make sense of its social and geopolitical significance in ways that were highly racialized. Page 99 situates these narratives in larger histories and scholarship on pandemic narratives. It also argues that as public narratives attempted to make sense of COVID-19 as an imperceptible virus that moves seamlessly through human carriers, they targeted Asian and Asian American people (and their environments, such as the commentary on wet markets) as embodiments of the virus itself. As the page argues, this narrative “manages anxieties about a ‘leaking’ Third World or threatened U.S. geopolitical dominance. By associating the virus with Asian/Americans, U.S. public discourses can replace an unlocatable and unstable anxiety with a definitive object- the virus can be given a cause, blame can be assigned, and Asian/Americans can stand in as symbolic embodiments of COVID-19 itself.” (99)

Although not a perfect representation of the book in its entirety, page 99 does touch on a key idea that brings it together: racial allegory. Making the Human theorizes racial allegory as the way that media, institutional, and cultural discourses narratively mobilize Asian American difference to naturalize a limited understanding of what it means to be human. The book addresses a range of contexts and sources across law, media, and popular culture, so a reader opening the book to page 99 wouldn’t know that the book also considers narratives of “justice” and “meritocracy” in the recent SCOTUS battle over affirmative action in chapter three, or that chapter two talks about gendered representations of Asian American families and mothering in popular film. Nevertheless, they would see the larger concept of racial allegory at play, namely in the discussion of how pandemic narratives are as much about power as they are about health. Making the Human is interested in how Asian Americans appear as key narrative figures in the stories we tell about social phenomena, including COVID-19: what are Asian Americans doing in these stories, and what do they represent? What value judgements do these stories use Asian Americans to imply, and what hierarchies do they implicitly normalize as a result? In the case of COVID-19, Asian Americans are framed as disease-ridden carriers, as conspiratorial agents of the Chinese nation state, as the specter of a supposedly backwards “Third World,” as indicators of U.S. national decline, and more. All of these stories are doing work: to shore up U.S. exceptionalism, to stoke fears of a geopolitically powerful Chinese nation-state, to resecure the boundaries of the (white) national body, and so forth. Other chapters focus on different narratives: for example, how the SCOTUS battle over affirmative action cast Asian Americans as studious, innocent, and victimized citizens, which then did the work of reframing age-old anti- Black backlash to affirmative action in the supposedly “anti-racist” language of defending Asian Americans. So, like the other chapters, this chapter illustrates that it is not only important to name a narrative as a racist stereotype, but also to understand what symbolic and material work that narrative is doing to normalize (or challenge) larger hierarchies.”

Visit Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "American Eldercide"

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including Agewise, Aged by Culture, and Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe. She is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Gullette applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It, and reported the following:

American Eldercide concerns a dreadful failure of social justice in the COVID Era. It starts as an investigation of how the Trump administration, Congress, and the states abandoned the 1,400,000 residents of nursing facilities early in the Era. People who happened to be living in those government-supervised facilities were twenty-six times more likely to die than the rest of us.

Many were exposed to the virus when they could have been protected. Discarded as if they were expendable. Dependent on authorities who seemed distant or witless. Unable to get away to greater safety. Often dying alone. Yet saving them would have been doable: There were only 1.4 million of them. And they were resilient, not at all ready to die. The catastrophe was due not to the residents’ “biology” but to the well-known, ongoing failures of the public-health system.

Books about COVID ignore or slight these indigent people, mostly women, most on Medicaid, often disabled. This book, fueled by righteous anger, has to explain how they came to be ignored and, by now, forgotten. Americans were trained to accept a terrifying, widespread new form of ageist ableism, that youth would survive, but another falsely homogeneous category called “The Old” would die. Neither stereotype was empirically true, but a panicky, distracted, misled, self-absorbed, and fearful society had some reasons to think so. Page 99, as continued on page 100, works well to present one of the key reasons.

.... Overriding distinctions of age, race, and class, transcending the surges and lulls, another number, growing only in one fierce and fatal direction, mesmerized the population: [the total number of American deaths.]. Thinking about death could be forced on anyone, daily. A writer in the Boston Globe condensed common impressions from that period:

It’s hard to remember a year when death was so in your face from morning to night—from pages of obituaries in the morning paper to the nightly news with its images of mobile morgues parked outside overwhelmed hospitals and cemetery workers burying bodies as fast as possible with few mourners present. [top p. 100]: As early as July 2020, a new statistic circulated, that 80 percent of the US dead were over the age of sixty-five. The headline “1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished” appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2021. The early blare of announcements that residents composed 40 percent of the dead, and in some states over half, was overshadowed. . . . Residents had made up only 0.42 percent of the population. Everyone over sixty-five constituted 16 percent.

Receiving less attention, the residents’ dire conditions may have caused less concern or regret. The most succinct definition of “the expendables” I have found is “people whose disappearance wouldn’t draw attention.” With the onset of a more encompassing dread, that small hapless group was exiled, farther still, from the social embrace.

American Eldercide closely studies a historical moment, the new COVID Era, that was full of unnoticed crises. In this tightly structured book, many themes and feelings from these two pages recur: the role of the media, the misuse of statistics, the fear that is called mortality salience, the mass-mind created by fear, the psychology of divergent groups within that mass.

The previous chapter, “The Hidden Truths of a Corrupt World,” details Trump’s narcissistic ageism and reveals how his administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid carefully disguised malfeasance.

American Eldercide is also full of antidotes to such strange, grim material: reliable facts and warmer ways to feel; policy proposals for reforming the system from public-health experts, and life-saving rules from the Biden administration. The real embrace of justice can come only from anti-ageism--a powerful intersection of feminism, anti-racism, disability activism, progressive theory, and responsible caring.

Learn more about American Eldercide at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America.

The Page 99 Test: Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger Chickering's "The German Empire, 1871–1918"

Roger Chickering is Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University. His publications include The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) and Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2014).

Chickering applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The German Empire, 1871–1918, and reported the following:

Browsers who crack open this book on page 99 will encounter the revival of Catholic piety in German Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, which culminated during the militant pontificate of Pius IX (1846-78). These developments set the backdrop for the Kulturkampf, the famous “culture war” between the confessions during the first years of the German Empire. This passage does not do well on the Page 99 Test; but I hope this result does not speak to the quality of the whole. The passage presents only an early hint of the broader problems that inform the book.

The third chapter, of which the passage is part, introduces one of several central themes that give shape to the work as a whole. To put the matter in musical terms, the book is designed a little like a fugue, in which the principal themes are introduced early, then developed in their interplay in the body of the work. The main themes are confession (Catholic and Protestant), social class, and regional tension between rural and urban Germany. Along with several other motifs—gender and ethnicity (including the “Jewish problem”)—they are analyzed together as the bases of pervasive sectoral strife in Imperial Germany. The book attends to the organization and mobilization of domestic conflict, political interaction among sectoral groups, questions of integration and national unity, colonialism and foreign policy, and finally the Great War of 1914-18, in which the German Empire perished amid domestic discord—with terrible consequences. The book offers a comprehensive history of the German Empire, a contribution to debates that have raged among historians of Germany for the past seventy years.

Learn more about The German Empire, 1871–1918 at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie J. Preston's "Complicit Participation"

Carrie J. Preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the founding Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching.

Preston applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Complicit Participation appears early in Chapter 4 and describes the history of blackface minstrelsy that informs George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921, and All That Followed (2016), the main focus of the chapter. This history is also important to the performance genealogy of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959) and its revival at The Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2003 – the topic of Chapter 1 – and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s radical adaptation An Octoroon (2014) – Chapters 2 and 3. From 1830 through the Harlem Renaissance, blackface minstrelsy and later derivatives like jazz, tap dancing, and ragtime were tremendously popular entertainments. They represented an ambivalent fascination with the Black male body and featured cross-gender costumes, dancing, music, and short skits. Page 99 starts the story of the supposed invention of blackface minstrelsy when T. D. Rice overheard the song of a Black stage-driver in Cincinnati singing “Jump Jim Crow.” The section ends with the argument that blackface minstrelsy is more complicated than we tend to assume, especially when the popular press associates minstrelsy with the emergence of offensive pictures of political leaders dressed in blackface in their youth. Minstrelsy was undeniably constructed for racist pleasure, particularly to serve as a pressure valve to relieve competition over jobs. It was also understood, by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, among others, as having the potential to perform new racial identities and cultivate an audience to appreciate them. Minstrelsy was not simply racist or antiracist, but like so many cultural products, much more complicated.

Readers picking up my book to learn about allyship and audience participation in contemporary theaters of racial justice would probably be surprised to turn to page 99 and find a history of 19th century minstrelsy. In that sense, the Page 99 Test would not introduce the browser to the main concern of my book. At the same time, I am very interested in the longer histories of racial performance that inform contemporary theaters, particularly minstrelsy and melodrama. My book is also particularly committed to the principle that understanding the complexity of historical performance helps us understand our current moment – in relation to theater and activism more generally. I give the Page 99 Test a 5 (out of 10) for my book.

I wrote much of this book during what felt to me like the dark days of the first administration of Donald Trump, never imagining that it would appear in the shadow of his second, nonconsecutive term as president. Much has not changed. I still believe that complicit participation is the prevailing framework through which many white liberals who identify as allies participate in theatrical and other institutional efforts grouped under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote the book to improve efforts for racial justice, not undermine them. Yet, in this moment, it can feel like there is no room for critiques of allyship from allies themselves, critiques from within. Today, I would emphasize most that allyship cannot be an individual practice but must involve communities in solidarity, resisting oppression and injustice wherever it emerges.

Learn more about Complicit Participation at the Oxford University Press website

--Marshal Zeringue

George González's "The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism"

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture at The CUNY Graduate Center and at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

González applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance initiates reflection upon an ethnographic scene that opens Chapter 3, which itself serves as a bridge between the two main sections of the book, Act I, which foregrounds the intellectual and political stakes of the relationships between our mode of consumption and climate catastrophe, and Act II, which centers the life and activism of the New York City-based anti-consumerist and “Earth Justice”-grounded radical performance community, The Stop Shopping Church (aka Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping). In short, reading page 99 would serve the prospective reader of the book well by situating them at an important thematic and analytical crossroads.

Chapter 3 begins with a description of one of the group’s street actions at the turn of the millennium: a small group from the ‘Church,’ led by Reverend Billy, a then parodic performance character developed by William Talen, a musician and actor, processes down the Times Square neighborhood toward the flagship Disney Store carrying two crucified oversized Mickey and Minnie Mouse plush dolls (‘fetishes’) on long sticks. Dressed as a combination of 1980s-style televangelist and Elvis, Reverend Billy preaches that Mickey Mouse is the antichrist. The action is designed to protest the Disney brand’s role in the commodification of sentiment and memory, its gentrification of the theater district, and its exploitation of global sweatshop labor.

Page 99 introduces two key considerations. The first is the historicity of the Marxian “commmodity fetishism.” As it turns out, the very idea of the fetish was born of transcultural encounters between sixteenth and seventeenth century Iberian traders and West African counterparts and reflects the values of the European racial chain of being. The second key consideration introduced on page 99 is Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that capitalism can be understood to be a “religiously conditioned construction” or an “essentially religious phenomenon” in its own right.

Bringing the work of the Stop Shopping Church into conversation with religious studies, performance studies, critical theory, sociology and anthropology, the ethnographic core of the book describes the ways in which the Stop Shopping Church has traditionally deployed the signifiers of American religion to mark and critique the co-constitutions of Evangelical Protestantism and neoliberal capitalism (consumerism as religiously constructed) as well as its organizing social function as religion (consumerism as essentially religious phenomenon). The book describes and analyzes the ways in which the originally parodic Stop Shopping Church has come to function as (in the group’s own words) a “post-religious religious” community grounded in green values and how and why the critique of the fetish (the finger wagging of ‘put down that Mickey Mouse doll!’) has, under the leadership of co-founders William Talen and Savitri D, transformed into a much more radical and capacious political ecology that takes direct critical aim at the ways in which the effects of ritualized consumption boomerang back at us in the form of extreme weather, species extinction, and deadly toxins taking up residence in human bodies (consumer capitalism as systemic ‘Shopocalypse’).

Visit George González's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salma Monani's "Indigenous Ecocinema"

Salma Monani is a professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She has extensively published in ecocinema studies, Indigenous ecomedia, and environmental justice. She is co-editor of four ecocritical media anthologies. As part of her College’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, she also engages in public eco-humanities along with community research with Indigenous partners.

Monani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Despite its time-consuming nature, Calder often works independently on her projects. Her decision to work without large crews is deliberate. First, she finds that the process allows her to more easily experience the relational spaces of her stories--“I often think of it as I'm going to the forest today, or I am being confined in that little room, as in Snip.” Second, she rejects the production norms of mainstream animation that employ an estranged Taylorized model of production. Such a model is geared to capitalist efficiency, often churning out films with such slick production that Calder notes they “feel like a roller coaster ride; I’m buckled in, it’s a dynamic thrill.” In contrast, Calder’s low-budget, individually created films are aimed to help audiences “feel” the labor and materials that are so often invisible in mainstream animation’s immersive projects (think Disney, in particular). While Disney might acknowledge some of its high-profile animators (e.g., in “how the film was made” extras), these acknowledgments tend to glamorize the process and hide systems that continue to perpetuate fleshy and earthly violence through problematic labor and environmental practices. For example, Hollywood productions often outsource labor to countries where working conditions are worse than those in home countries; the impacts are felt at home too where workers are laid off…

… Calder refuses to partake in these discriminatory systems. Despite knowing that her production choices might disadvantage her in terms of how quickly she can make a film, she would rather situate her filmmaking within a work ethic that is relationally bound—to her Indigenous communities and the decolonial and ecological messages she presents onscreen. In other words, much like Monnet, Calder is acutely attentive both to how she encodes Indigenous cinema time(s) onscreen and to how she grounds her production in material practices that honor Native being in time as relational processes of living ethically and in kinship with the human and more-than-human world.

The excerpt from page 99 works well to provide a partial snapshot of the book’s goals as it draws attention to the ecological dimensions of one Indigenous filmmaker, stop-motion animator Terril Calder (Métis)’ cinema practices. In the book, I argue that we can learn a lot about a) how cinema—its onscreen messages as well as its off-screen production, reception and distribution practices—are enmeshed in environmental contexts, and b) how contemporary Indigenous cinema helps us re-evaluate these enmeshments with an eye to social and environmental justice. Essentially, a goal of Indigenous Ecocinema is to bring ecocritical attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive, and simultaneously, another goal is to bring, Indigenous intellectual voices front and center into (eco)cinema conversations. Interlacing these two goals, the book offers d-ecocinema criticism, a methodological approach that invites Indigenous (and, thus relatedly, decolonial) frames to our understandings of cinema’s ecological entanglements.

In this excerpt, Calder reflects on her cinema, comparing it to the practices of mainstream animation cinema industries. In discussing her process of working independently, despite the time it takes, Calder helps direct our attention to the environmental and social justice implications of cinema production. At the end of the excerpt, I mention another filmmaker (Caroline Monnet, an Anishinaabe/French experimental artist) whose work is also ethically oriented to ecosocial justice. Throughout the book, I showcase film creatives who challenge the business-as-usual modes of cinema industries and instead engage in cinema practices that engage land and community responsibilities, on and off screen.

Not surprisingly, it would be a lot to ask one page of the book to best capture Indigenous Ecocinema’s broader goal to offer the methodological approach of d-ecocinema criticism. The page definitely implies this goal as I foreground Calder’s insights as essential to my analyses. However, this excerpt does not demonstrate how extensively I draw on Indigenous intellectual thought and scholarship to expand the current purview of (eco)critical cinema theory and practice. To engage with this broader goal, I invite you to read the book, which explores three essential ingredients of cinema worlds—place, time, and feelings. Spotlighting these three components, the book reads Indigenous cinema as d-ecocinema (with attention to decolonial and ecological frames of reference) and offers cinema aficionados and scholars alike a roadmap to re-orient away from current business-as-usual extractive and exploitative media environments.

Learn more about Indigenous Ecocinema at the West Virginia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanna Krivulskaya's "Disgraced"

Suzanna Krivulskaya is Associate Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in gender, religion, and digital history. She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion.

Her first book is Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism. The monograph is a sweeping religious and cultural history of ministerial sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates how pastoral sex scandals have been covered in the popular press and how Protestant denominations and the reading public responded to the coverage.

Krivulskaya applied the “Page 99 Test” to Disgraced and reported the following:

Page 99 contains snippets of two of the many stories I tell in the book—these two from the early twentieth century. The first is about how an anonymous letter alleging homosexual activity and an internal Presbyterian investigation resulted in a quiet dismissal of John Balcom Shaw, an early fundamentalist leader, in 1918. To demonstrate how Protestant denominations began dealing with the epidemic of sex scandals, I write, “The Presbyterians succeeded in handling Shaw’s case internally and relegated his sexual proclivities to the realm of mental health.” (Shaw had been advised to admit himself to a sanitarium by the men in charge of the investigation.)

The second case, which I begin telling on page 99, is about the Episcopal Navy chaplain Samuel Neal Kent, who was accused of paying sailors for sexual favors in 1919. I explain that “during his trial, details of the government-sanctioned investigation by means of engagement with the alleged homosexuals shocked the public.” (The Navy had instructed undercover officers to obtain evidence of homosexual activity by engaging in it with the accused sailors and the chaplain.) Although the Episcopal Church initially stood by Kent, he was transferred to a different post shortly after his acquittal and left religious work altogether in 1921. This case, along with a handful of others, demonstrates that by the 1920s, Protestant denominations had begun to grapple with the best tactics for managing the sex scandals that kept plaguing them. While some labored to hide them, others attempted to defend the accused clergy—even if they ultimately chose to part ways with problematic ministers.

Page 99 gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, though its scope is limited to two particular scandals that are representative of broader changes that I describe in the monograph. One way in which page 99 is a poor representation of the book is the fact that both cases featured here had previously been written about by other scholars: Kathryn Lofton first taught us about Shaw in her article “Queering Fundamentalism,” and George Chauncey and John Loughery have described the Kent debacle in their work. While Disgraced certainly builds on the insights of these and other historians, it also introduces many new stories, characters, and conclusions—particularly about the multi-decade trajectory of how sex scandals transformed American religion.

Visit Suzanna Krivulskaya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Lodge's "The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective"

Sara Lodge is senior lecturer in Victorian literature and culture at the University of St Andrews. Her last book, Inventing Edward Lear, was described by Jenny Uglow as “by far the best thing I have ever read on Lear.”

Lodge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, and reported the following:

You might get your kicks on page 66. But on page 99, you will find a key line. My book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, is about real-life women in the nineteenth century who worked to solve mysteries, crimes, and to detect malfeasance, whether with the police or as private enquiry agents. But it’s also about the myth of the female detective as it developed on the Victorian stage and page. Page 99 is in the chapter on theatre. It describes the stage appearance of Sara Lane – actor-manager of London’s Britannia theatre– in Colin Henry Hazlewood’s play The Female Detective, in 1865. A key feature of the role was to emphasize Lane’s dramatic powers. The female detective could convince the public that she was anyone at all: male or female, old or young, from anywhere in the world:

In a tour de force of quick-change versatility, she metamorphoses into Grizzle Gutteridge (‘a Somersetshire Wench’), Mrs Gammage (an ancient Nurse), Mr Harry Racket (a fast young Man) and Barney O’Brian (an Irish boy ‘from the bogs of Ballyragget’). Such protean dramatic changes required great skill: they were a visible masterclass in acting, where the lead actress showed her many different faces, accents and costumes.

FLORENCE: I hear you’re a widder, mim –– so am I; matrimony’s a serus thing – I declare I never shall forget how I felt when Gammage said, “With my goods I thee endow.” He kept a furniture shop, mim, but when he died I found I was mistaken, and I was left executioner to an intestine estate, with everybody a trying to circumvent the poor widow’s mite, mim. Oh, dear! (cries)

Of course, Sara Lane playing Florence playing Mrs Gammage, who can’t tell an executor from an executioner, is not to be taken entirely seriously. Yet the point she makes about women being cheated in marriage recurs throughout the play. Florence Langton constantly berates the male sex, remarking: ‘That’s just like those horrid men. I begin to think it’s high time they were abolished altogether’ and ‘this monstrosity on two legs, called a man’; ‘what men say and what they do are two very different things.’ She sings the song from Much Ado about Nothing. ‘Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever’– but unlike Shakespeare’s female leads Beatrice and Hero, Florence and Una remain happily single at the play’s end. Women’s legal vulnerability in marriage is a persistent theme.

Although page 99 only showcases one aspect of my research – the female detective in Victorian theatre – it does pick up a theme that will recur throughout the book. The feisty female detective character responds to male violence and abuse and reflects real concerns about women’s safety and women’s rights in this period. Domestic violence in this play is a key predictor of public felonies. Though Hazlewood’s play is a melodrama, with a sensational plot, this contention is accurate. Women’s ‘natural curiosity’, and decision to ‘act’ in a detective role is depicted as a necessary corrective to male deception.

Throughout its chapters, my book compares the moral ambiguities of women’s real- life investigative cases in the Victorian period and the ways in which Victorians imagined female detectives, often as heroines with aspirational physical and mental powers. There is a gulf—then as now – between our desire for strong women to be able to secure other women’s safety, and the realities of law enforcement. But staging the female detective – whether it is Sara Lane or Kate Winslet playing her – is one way of asserting women’s right to get even, and to be who they choose to be.

Learn more about The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek W. Black's "Dangerous Learning"

Derek W. Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center.

In 2020, his book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, warned that current education trends represent a retreat from our nation’s foundational commitments to democracy and public education.

Black applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops the reader at a major crossroads in America history and, more specifically, Virginia’s history. Nat Turner has just led the highest profile slave revolt in U.S. history and is still at a large. John Floyd, the governor of Virginia at the time, has his misgivings about slavery but has a crisis to address, so he targets abolitionist newspapers—like William Llyod Garrison’s The Liberator—as a source of the evil the state has just experienced.

Focused solely on Virginia in the 1830s, page 99 cannot directly portray the book’s larger national narrative of the fight for freedom through black literacy, newspapers, and ultimately public education. But page 99 captures the tension that pervades so many of the most important moments in the book. Floyd leads a slaveholding state, but on the very next page, he hatches his plan to see the institution’s end. A few months later, the Virginia General Assembly is openly debating the abolition of slavery—something almost unimaginable in retrospect. That debate, in my estimation, was the South’s last gasp of rationality. From there, the South sets out on a path that can only end in war. Black literacy, independent newspapers, open debate, and a toleration of those with different perspectives all fall victim—often violently—along that path.

Those moments speak most directly to issues of race, but they are also cautionary tales of what happens when society or government refuse to allow any choir other than their own sing. And sadly, the paranoia about foreign ideas, black literacy, and what would become of the South never leaves. Though public education triumphantly rises from the ashes of the Civil War three decades later—largely through the demands and efforts of black people—old suspicions in the white community persist, trying to take public education down and control its narratives.

Visit Derek W. Black's website.

The Page 99 Test: Schoolhouse Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marlene L. Daut's "The First and Last King of Haiti"

Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. She is the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (2024); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015).

Daut applied the “Page 99 Test” to The First and Last King of Haiti and reported the following:

On page 99, I am in the process of describing the French colonists’ murderous response to the beginning of the Black freedom struggle to end slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that we now call the Haitian Revolution. One of the architects of the initial August 1791 freedom strike was a man named Boukman. In retaliation for the fact that he and the other freedom fighters set fire to the northern plain in less than one month, the colonists put a bounty on his head. Unfortunately, this offer of monetary compensation succeeded when a colonist named M. Michel brought the decapitated freedom leader’s head to French officials and claimed the promised 6,000 colonial livres. Because the hotel where Christophe worked in Saint-Domingue, called La Couronne, is centrally located in the colony’s principal port town, Cap-Français, I suggest that if Christophe remained employed there in the early days of the Revolution, he may have witnessed this flurry of revolutionary activity that ended with Boukman’s head posted on a pike as a warning to the other freedom fighters.

At first glance, the page 99 test does not seem to work well for my book, which is about Christophe’s rise to King of Haiti in the post-revolutionary era, and his eventual downfall in 1820 due to a conspiracy that formed against him, resulting in his death. However, if we follow to the next page the story about Boukman, Cap-Français, and the French commissioners and soldiers who arrive in fall 1791 to stop the freedom struggle, something a bit remarkable happens. At the very end of page 100, I discuss how the remaining leaders of the post-Boukman freedom struggle, which included the famous Toussaint Louverture but not Christophe, attempted to negotiate with French authorities. In a letter they sent to French authorities in fall 1791 they state that if the French colonists give in to their freedom demands, “public prosperity will be reborn from its ashes.” This, of course, is a highly resonant and supremely relevant phrase, since as I wrote on this page, it “later became a part of Christophe’s motto as king of Haiti.”

Visit Marlene L. Daut's website.

The Page 99 Test: Awakening the Ashes.

--Marshal Zeringue