She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Grievous Entanglement: Consumption, Connection, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, with the following results:
As the pivot point between the two sections of Grievous Entanglement, the single paragraph on page 99 aptly introduces the book’s major concerns. It reminds readers that consumption-as-connection, the focus of the book, existed because meanings of the word “consume” shifted in the eighteenth century to include the economic sense of buying as well as older, largely negative senses like “eat” and “destroy.” The book as a whole argues that this semantic shift unlocked new ways for people far away from slavery to envision their own connection to (and complicity in) slavery. Consumption-as-connection revealed how everyday purchases drove a system designed to make human beings (economically) consumable. As page 99 notes, the first section of the book explores how this conceptual framework enabled people to understand commodities like sugar and tobacco as direct links to the enslaved laborers who had produced them. The rest of page 99 introduces the book’s second section, which moves from depictions of actual commodities to the metaphors of violent eating that permeated the discourse on slavery. Commentators repeatedly used metaphors of cannibalism or ravenous animals to capture the depredations of chattel slavery as well as its economic logic.Learn more about Grievous Entanglement at the University of Virginia Press website.
While page 99 offers an overview of the structure and argument of Grievous Entanglement, it does not give a sense of how that argument is developed. Grievous Entanglement investigates a conceptual framework adopted by a wide range of people throughout the Atlantic world. In order to show the pervasiveness of this thought pattern, the book carefully analyzes small details in a variety of texts, including poems, paintings, songs, political cartoons, novels, and antislavery pamphlets. A reader might thus get a better idea of the work by turning to a page that analyzes how Harriet Jacobs deploys animal imagery to denounce enslaver appetites or how Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses cannibalism metaphors to critique consumers’ failure to recognize the source of their luxuries. One chapter considers not only the lyrics of a blackface minstrel song, but the significance of the material form of the book in which it was printed; another traces how narratives by formerly enslaved abolitionists who resisted hungry animals influenced academic painting on both sides of the Atlantic. These cultural close readings illuminate historical conceptions of slavery, and that, ultimately, is the heart of the book.
--Marshal Zeringue
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