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.Visit Surekha Davies's website.
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.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
