Faisal Devji's "Waning Crescent"

Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence and Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea.

Devji applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, and reported the following:

A reader chancing on page 99 of my book would get a good idea of its argument. The book tells the story of how Islam came to be understood as a protagonist in history. From the second half of the 19 th century, it steadily lost meaning as a word describing Muslim acts of devotion to become a subject in its own right. Coinciding with the diminution of Muslim sovereignty within European empires, this new understanding of Islam not only displaced the political agency of Muslims but also the theological agency they attributed to God and Muhammad. On page 99 I deal with one way in which both these forms of agency were rendered impossible.

Unlike the generality of colonised intellectuals who sought to recover their sovereignty, Islamist thinkers were deeply suspicious of its unregulated violence in colonial and other modern states. Like the anarchists from whom many Islamists took inspiration, they wanted to deprive the nation-states succeeding colonial rule of the violent potential of sovereignty. And they did so by claiming that sovereignty, seen as the authority to create as much as suspend and override the law, could only belong to God. As such it could not be exercised by men, with the state having to conform instead to the divine law as interpreted by Muslim scholars who worked outside its remit and so represented society or rather social as opposed to political power.

Pakistan, which became the world’s first Islamic Republic in 1956, has therefore been extraordinarily innovative by abjuring sovereignty in all three of its constitutions. Rather than preventing its exercise, however, the refusal to vest sovereignty in any institution or, indeed, the people, ended up making it a free-floating possibility that has continued to haunt Pakistani politics. There it is manifested most frequently in the military coup, ironically the purest or most excessive act of sovereign power outside the law. The workings of Pakistani politics, of course, are not determined by this constitutional feature alone, but are nevertheless legitimised and make thinkable by it.

The constitutional history of Pakistan shows us how a sovereignty handed into God’s keeping is not only denied its citizens but premised upon God’s own expulsion from political life. For the divine law is meant to be seen as a form of self-governance by and within society and not the state. And it represents not the people, who are as liable to usurp God’s sovereignty as any politician or general, but Islam itself as the true subject of Muslim history.

Learn more about Waning Crescent at the Yale University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Impossible Indian.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Marriott's "Land, Law and Empire"

John Marriott is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford and has published extensively on the nexus between London and India.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Land, Law and Empire: The Origins of British Territorial Power in India, with the following results:

Page 99 gives a brief account of the dramatic shift in the East India Company’s geopolitics of trade in India that occurred from the 1630s.

Uncannily, I can think of no other page in the book which provides a neater summary of the underlying narrative of the company’s quest for territory. Frustrated by what they perceived as the intransigence of Mughal authorities and rival European colonial powers at the port of Surat where they had first settled, company agents were impelled to explore other trading opportunities where the authorities would prove much less resistant to the acquisition of defensible territory. The Coromandel Coast, beyond the immediate control of the Mughal Empire, did just that, and so it was that a small, seemingly unpromising fishing village called Madras became their first permanent settlement. Under the company, Madras grew dramatically as a trading centre. With renewed confidence – and some chance – the company later acquired Bombay from the Portuguese, and toward the end of the century Calcutta. By then, although the amount of territory held by the company was minute, the ideological, legal, political and economic foundations had been laid for the great land grabs of the eighteenth century.

The book, which I hope is accessible and jargon free, provides a new account of the foundations of British rule of India. While researching it I was struck in particular by how pragmatic the enterprise was. Territorial power was not secured through a carefully crafted plan but through the decisions taken for the most part by a relatively small coterie of company agents working in India.

Learn more about Land, Law and Empire at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anderson Hagler's "Sins of Excess"

Anderson Hagler is Assistant Professor of World Religions and Cultures at Western Michigan University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sins of Excess: The Spatial Politics of Idolatry and Magic in Colonial Mexico, and shared the following:

Open the book Sins of Excess to page 99 and you will find that it corresponds to the first page of Chapter 4 “Geography and Popular Magic in New Spain.” As such, page 99 provides an outline of the chapter’s main argument which states, “This chapter emphasizes the cultural composition of geography to advance the argument that Native topographies became excessive in the minds of Spanish colonizers when Indigenous and African descent peoples revered them using non-orthodox rituals.” The next paragraph defines the use of geography noting:

Geography concerns the physical features of landscapes and the confluence of discourse with location.... Because labels used to describe Native landscapes and buildings were laden with ethnocentric understandings, the mere occupation of such spaces indicated wrongdoing. Consequently, Catholic priests and secular officials associated sophisticated non-orthodox rituals with Devil worship.

Funnily enough, the Page 99 Test works well for Sins of Excess. Page 99 does indeed provide a solid overview for much of the book. The project as a whole addresses the concept of “excess” as used by Spanish clergy and secular officials and notes its many negative connotations. I maintain that the use of “excess” as a derogatory label expanded over the years to include a wide array of crimes in colonial New Spain, including murder, theft (Chapter 1), idolatry (Chapter 2), shapeshifting, non-orthodox methods of healing (Chapter 3), sodomy, and bestiality (Chapter 5). The fourth chapter, which encompasses page 99, delves into the negative value judgements made regarding landscapes like mountains, caves, and rivers when Indigenous and African descent peoples inhabited them and performed magical rituals. Doing so shows that a mountain was not simply an inanimate object made of minerals. The terms used to describe what people saw, e.g. alp, sierra, summit, were intwined with cultural meaning. In this way, the mere inhabitation of space seemingly manifested sin when Indigenous and African descent peoples performed non-orthodox rituals therein. As such, the study of geography cannot be value neutral as often presented in educational institutions. All branches of knowledge are imbued with value judgements, including ethnography, science, religion, and history. It is my hope that Sins of Excess will help to highlight this observation and combat negative stereotypes made against Native and African descent peoples in rural areas.

Visit Anderson Hagler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bailey Brown's "Kindergarten Panic"

Bailey A. Brown completed her PhD in sociology from Columbia University. At Columbia, she previously earned a M. Phil. and M.A and was named Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology with minors in urban education and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, a Leadership Alliance Fellow, graduated cum laude, and received top departmental honors for her senior thesis at Penn. Brown is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College. Prior to her position at Spelman, she was a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

Brown applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Kindergarten Panic describes one mother’s search for a diverse New York City elementary school. Jaime attended schools in the southern United States that were integrated through mandated busing. This diverse educational experience serves as an important context for the school she desired for her son. As Jaime went on school tours, she came to the haunting realization that though New York City was diverse, the schools were heavily segregated and often tracked along racial/ethnic lines.

Jaime’s story appears in Chapter 3 "You Don’t Really Feel the Diversity" which discusses how parents considered the racial/ethnic makeup of schools. The chapter focuses on the concept of “racialized school decision-making" labor. I demonstrate that Black, Latina/o and immigrant families take on more labor to identify safe and racially-inclusive schools for their children. While most white parents did not express concerns about a school’s level of racial inclusivity directly, I include Jaime’s story on page 99 to offer a perspective on the few white middle-class parents who saw their resistance towards tracked and heavily segregated schools as an intentional “social justice” decision. For this reason, readers who open to page 99 would learn a lot about central themes in Kindergarten Panic, particularly how parents develop preferences for school and how the school search requires an investment of time and energy.

Landing on page 99 in Kindergarten Panic also highlights several important contributions of the book. Jaime's intensive and multi-method search strategy reflects that for all parents the school search requires labor. Further Jaime’s role as a mother also reflects key gender norms undergirding school search processes—that mothers take primary responsibility for the school search. At the same time, Jaime’s social position as a white middle-class mother is reflected in her ability to search more strategically for schools, research several school options and approach diversity not as a safety concern but instead as an added benefit. Jaime’s story broadly demonstrates that parents’ individual search experiences varied and that how parents are able to search for schools is shaped by gender, race, class and neighborhood.

Across Kindergarten Panic I argue that while the increase in school choice options in early elementary school was intended to broaden opportunities, these new school options place a greater burden on parents, increasing expectations to search for schools intensively and increasing the labor of school decision-making. Each chapter highlights how these factors differently shape parents’ school choice journeys. I conclude that school choice policy must take seriously persistent inequalities in school access in order to better design and restructure school choice programs to ensure greater equity.

Visit Bailey Brown's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maria Corrigan's "Monuments Askew"

Maria Corrigan is an assistant professor in the College in the Visual and Media Arts Department and Comedic Arts Program at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book is the last page of Chapter 3, which focuses entirely on the Factory of the Eccentric Actor's 1926 film, The Overcoat (Shinel'). Because FEKS founders Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were mere teenagers when they began their artistic experiments, their work is often considered less mature than the more famous Soviet avant-garde films of the 1920s. In general, my book provides a cultural history of FEKS and its filmic output. On this particular page, I am concluding the chapter by summing up the group's remarkable and innovative approach to the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's classic short story, focusing specifically on the collective's treatment of the strange protagonist, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who is all at once eccentric, funny, and piercingly tragic:

In developing Akaky as an Eccentric protagonist, the directors introduce a conflictual play not merely among the tenets of Left-Futurism and the haunting images of Expressionism but also the easy comedic grace of American slapstick film, in which the major protagonists manipulate the objects around them both to make the audience laugh and to remake their environment in unpredictable ways. The audience feels safe laughing at slapstick protagonists because, despite their foibles and difficulty integrating themselves into the modern world, they are also unquestionably sympathetic and the hero of the tale. Akaky, in contrast, is barely the hero of his own close-up, and laughing at him is morally ambiguous at best because his audience runs the risk of identifying as the subject of his mournful plea, “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” From this perspective, the uneasy combination of genres is put to singular use, in the sense that the “Eccentric manner” of the kino-play offers a comedic approach to a tragic character. Moreover, the combination of perspectives offered by the multiple authors and influences—imperial, Soviet, Ukrainian, German, and North American—calls attention to how much is lost when one considers the project a national one rather than a contact zone for a collection of outsiders, immigrants, and eccentrics: Gogol, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Nosferatu, Chaplin, Akaky. From a national cinema framework, then, Eccentrism is best seen as a secondary or peripheral movement, the work of daring youngsters, Leningrad’s alternative to Moscow, one that offers another subject relation, vis-à-vis the Eccentric protagonist, to cities, monuments, canons, and genres.

Though it's not the most engaging introduction to my book, coming as it does at the tail end of a chapter, the passage, oddly enough, sums up the book's arguments quite well. My central claims are all at play here: FEKS was juggling genres, literary theory, inspirations, authors, and visions of a mythical city in a film that has somehow escaped sustained analysis. This excerpt hints at some of the formal analysis conducted in the chapter (how Akaky takes up space within the frame of a close-up) while also addressing the way the film uses cinematic devices to capture Nikolai Gogol's remarkable shifts in tone, style, and register. As it turns out, page 99 is an apt introduction to the Eccentrism that stands at the heart of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor.

If someone were to read page 99 alone, that reader would get a gloss on one specific Soviet film that requires greater cultural, theoretical, and formal analysis to be understood. On the one hand, I'm pleased that this experiment delivers a sample to the reader that is so clearly emblematic of the book's larger goal: that is, to give FEKS the kind of scholarly treatment that has been lavished upon the collective's contemporaries. On the other hand, if this reader were not already interested in the topic of Soviet silent film, then they would definitely miss out on some of the book's more enjoyable acrobatics: personal histories, creative disagreements, long forgotten diaries, archival discoveries, and gossip. Just by flipping the page, this reader would find themselves at the beginning of one of four of the book's "eccentric interludes," and smack-dab in the middle of a bitter break-up between FEKS founders, Kozintsev and Trauberg. These interludes reflect on why Eccentric history is so challenging to write: a collective is rarely in agreement. And when almost every member of a collective writes a memoir decades later, there are many competing claims to parse. I think I'd rather lure an unsuspecting browser in with page 101, but I'm not sure that's playing within the rules of the game.

Learn more about Monuments Askew at the Rutgers University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas Sattig's "How Time Passes"

Thomas Sattig is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tübingen. From 2002 to 2005, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. Sattif has held tenure-track positions as Assistant Professor at Tulane University and at Washington University in St. Louis. He has been a regular Visiting Professor at USI, Lugano since 2019.

Sattig applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, How Time Passes, and shared the following:

As regards page 99. It is the first page of Part B of the book, in which I turn from the passage of time in the physical world to the passage of time in human experience. The page is the break of dawn after a dark night. At this point in the journey, it is clear that Part A's project of finding the dynamic aspect of time in the physical world has failed. We are about to embark on Part B’s project of locating the source of time's passage, which separates time from space, in our conscious experiences of the world. The latter project will turn out to succeed. But page 99 itself does not yet convey an idea of the new project. It just contains a summary of preliminaries.

That is, page 99 is significant. But its significance does not concern its content. Its significance concerns its physical location in the book. Does this mean that the Page 99 Test fails in this case? You tell me!

Learn more about How Time Passes at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Maneesh Arora's "Parties and Prejudice"

Maneesh Arora is the Jane Bishop '51 Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He is also a visiting fellow in the Reimagining Democracy program at the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Center. He recieved his PhD in political science from UC Irvine in 2019.

Arora applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Parties and Prejudice: The Normalization of Antiminority Rhetoric in US Politics, and shared the following results:

Page 99 of my new book, Parties and Prejudice, drops readers right into one of its central claims: candidates who use overtly Islamophobic language tend to draw stronger support from Republican voters than from Democrats. This isn’t just about individual prejudice—it’s about how the two parties have developed very different rules, or social norms, for what counts as acceptable political speech.

Those norms didn’t emerge by accident. On the Republican side, several forces have worked together to shape them: conservative media outlets that amplify harmful anti-minority stereotypes and conspiracy theories, the growth of anti-minority hate groups within the far-right movement, widespread negative views of Muslims and other minority groups among Republican voters, and party incentives to appeal directly to those views.

In that sense, the Page 99 Test captures the book well. It shows how certain minority groups—notably Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community—face overtly hostile political rhetoric, and how the pushback against that hostility is often too weak to change the conversation. It also highlights how an inegalitarian norm environment, in which anti-minority rhetoric can be wielded unchecked, is politically useful to the GOP.

Donald Trump didn’t invent this inegalitarian political environment, but he knew how to use it. His rise shows how overt Islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia can take root when they’re not forcefully and categorically rejected. Parties and Prejudice explores how party politics and social norms combine to shape the political power of prejudice—and how that dynamic has reshaped the modern Republican Party and, more broadly, American politics today.

Visit Maneesh Arora's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adam Cureton's "Sovereign Reason"

Adam Cureton is Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee. He received a B.Phil. in philosophy from the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship and a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on ethics and Kant, including a collection on human dignity and essays on respect, solidarity, and hope. He is also an internationally recognized scholar in philosophy of disability who published a book on respect for people with disabilities and edited several collections in this area.

Cureton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign Reason: Autonomy and our Interests of Reason, and reported the following:

If a browser opened my book to page 99, they would land on what may be its most distinctive and provocative idea. Moralists from several traditions, especially those influenced by the 18 th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, have long thought that good people govern themselves through their own reason, living by reasonable standards they endorse for themselves rather than by mere custom, whim, habit, or selfishness. Yet such autonomy has often seemed illusory. Reason is frequently portrayed as a passive tool, a calculator of means or prover of logical theorems, that is better suited to serve our purposes rather than to rule over us.

Page 99 begins to upend this picture. I argue there that several of our mental powers are not mere abilities or instruments. They have built into them active dispositions, tendencies, desires, and other interests that move us to act. Our power of understanding does not simply wait for prompting; it pushes us to make sense of the world around us. Our power of judgment can itself acquire habits of thought that bias our thinking. Most importantly, our power of reason contains active elements that lead us to recognize moral principles, to hold ourselves accountable to them, and to resist doing what we know is wrong.

These “interests of reason” also extend beyond tendencies to govern ourselves by moral principles. As the book progresses, I explain that, as rational creatures, we have substantive interests of reason in expanding our knowledge, promoting freedom and justice, relieving the suffering of those around us, developing our natural talents, respecting ourselves and others, and cultivating friendships and other social bonds. To have reason, in this sense, is already to care about these things for their own sake.

The central theme of the book is that each of us is like a political state, with competing factions vying for power and influence. In an autonomous, well-governed person, reason holds the reigns, aligning our desires, beliefs, and actions with the demands of morality, and moving us to treat everyone with equal dignity and respect. Page 99 offers readers a first glimpse of that ideal.

Learn more about Sovereign Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jane S. Smith's "A Blacklist Education"

Jane S. Smith writes about the intersection of science, business, popular taste, and social history. She received her B.A. from Simmons College and her Ph.D. from Yale University and has taught at Northwestern University on topics ranging from twentieth century fiction to the history of public health. She lives in Chicago, where she works in a very small room with a very large window.

Smith applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Blacklist Education: American History, a Family Mystery, and a Teacher Under Fire, with the following results:

Page 99 of A Blacklist Education explores one of several surprising sources of the official anti-communist program to purge left-leaning teachers, many of them Jewish, from New York City’s public schools. In a time of Congressional hearings about possible communist synpathizers in government and in Hollywood, the Superintendent of Schools of the largest public education system in the county was also deeply influenced by arch-conservative members of the Catholic Church. New York’s Cardinal Spellman, politically reactionary and rabidly anti-Communist, arranged the election of a conservative Catholic layman, George Timone, to the Board of Education. Timone, whose earlier pro-nazi sympathies of the 1930s had morphed into a crusade against a perceived communist menace in the classroom, immediately began a successful campaign to bar unions, ban books, codify principles of guilt-by-association, and otherwise suspend civil liberties for school employees.

But this is only one thread in the story, and readers need to go beyond page 99 to see the full scope of the book. A Blacklist Education sets the multiple historical sources and continuing effects of Red Scare hysteria against the plight of an individual teacher--who stands for all the teachers, librarians, actors, writers, government workers, and other “suspect types” whose names were too often lost in the blanket firings of a repressive era.

It took over fifty years for me to learn that my own father was one of those hundreds of New York City teachers pushed out of the classroom, a discovery that led me down one of the bumpier rabbit holes in American history. Suddenly I was petitioning for access to restricted archives and reading transcripts of secret interrogations where teachers, ignorant of either their alleged crimes or their accusers, could only prove their loyalty to their country and their fealty to the Superintendent of Schools by accusing other teachers of subversion. Other archives held collections of alarmist anti-communist pamphlets and newsletters, the ancestors of today’s conspiracy-minded broadcasts. These relics of Cold War panic attacked everything from the United Nations to the socialist tendencies of school orchestras; sinister “indoctrination” by liberal teachers was always a theme.

As I studied the contrast between the tales of subversive teachers and the real lives of the victims, ordinary people just trying to do their jobs, apocalyptic warnings jarred against my own knowledge of family devotion to civic duty and memories of patriotic trips to historic sites. As happens today, the consequences of applying ideology to education were powerfully destructive, not only for those who were directly attacked and their students, but also for a society bent out of shape by a culture of suspicion and retribution.

Visit Jane S. Smith's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Garden of Invention.

--Marshal Zeringue

Doug Most's "Launching Liberty"

Doug Most is a veteran journalist in Massachusetts, a native of Rhode Island, the author of three books, and now the Executive Editor and an Assistant Vice President at Boston University. He's worked at newspapers in Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and New Jersey. He spent 15 years as magazine and features editor at The Boston Globe, and has had feature stories appear in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. His new book, Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War, tells the human story behind the epic race to build the Liberty ships of World War II. His previous book, The Race Underground, is the narrative history of Boston and New York struggling with dangerously overcrowded neighborhoods and desperately searching for relief through the painstaking construction of subway tunnels beneath their streets. That book was optioned for a PBS/American Experience documentary called The Race Underground. Most's first book, Always in Our Hearts, was a true-crime story based in New Jersey and Delaware about two teenagers who hid their pregnancy from their parents and killed their baby to avoid responsibility.

Most applied the “Page 99 Test” to Launching Liberty and shared the following:

When writing a book about World War II, the greatest challenge is finding an original, character-driven, human interest story that has not yet been fully told in narrative and historical depth. I hope Launching Liberty achieves that, zeroing in on a critical, defining aspect of the war that has been overlooked and underappreciated—the building of America’s Liberty ships, an emergency fleet of nearly 3,000 cargo ships that were needed to carry President Roosevelt’s famous Arsenal of Democracy to our troops around the world.

Page 99 is an important page in Launching Liberty, as it turns out, because it’s the start of a new chapter. Chapter Thirteen is titled “A Boy’s Dreams.”

Before the Liberty ships could be built, they had to be designed down to their last screw—and the boy in “A Boy’s Dreams” is a young child named William Francis Gibbs, who would go on to become the greatest ship designer in the world in the early to mid-20th century. But at the start of the chapter, he is just a boy, eight years old, standing in Philadelphia alongside his younger brother and their father on a blustery morning, November 12, 1894, to see the launching of the largest ocean liner ever built, the SS St. Louis. President Grover Cleveland was also there. The Gibbs boys watched as music faded and, the first lady, Frances Cleveland, smashed a champagne bottle across the 550-foot hull, and the ship slide down into the Delaware River.

I described the ship this way: “The St. Louis was almost as long as two football fields, built of steel, decorated from bow to stern with colorful flags from around the world, and powered by a pair of reciprocating engines that could propel her forward at a speedy twenty knots.”

Because page 99 is the opening of a new chapter, it does a great job of showing the reader how the book is really a narrative, built around dates and events and people, the characters who drive the story forward. There are no Liberty ships without William Francis Gibbs and his brilliant ship designs, and his inspiration for becoming a famous shipbuilder began on that blustery fall morning in Philadelphia, as a wide-eyed eight-year old boy.

Learn more about the book and author at Doug Most's website, Facebook page, Instagram home, and Threads page.

My Book, The Movie: The Race Underground.

--Marshal Zeringue