Martin Ruef's "Between Slavery and Capitalism"

Martin Ruef is the Egan Family Professor of Sociology and director of Markets and Management Studies at Duke University. He is the author of The Entrepreneurial Group and the coauthor of Organizations Evolving and Institutional Change and Healthcare Organizations.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Between Slavery and Capitalism: The Legacy of Emancipation in the American South, and reported the following:

One of the enduring questions about the end of slavery in America is what happened to the South’s planter aristocracy. In Origins of the New South, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that there were only a “few survivors of the old planter class” who were able to prosper within the new economic order. Others, such as the late John Hope Franklin, have debated Woodward’s conclusion, offering a thesis of planter persistence in which the South’s planter class maintained its power or reinvented itself after the Civil War. Both perspectives tap into the roots of broader scholarly inquiry into the survival of conservative, pre-capitalist elites amid processes of economic reform and industrialization.

The Page 99 test brings Between Slavery and Capitalism to the heart of this issue. While earlier historiography relies heavily on surviving biographical materials from planters themselves, this part of the book assembles Census data on the top one percent of wealth holders in the U.S. Lower South in 1860 and 1870. On the whole, the evidence weighs against the intuition that the wealth of the Southern planter class was rapidly disrupted by the war and the end of chattel slavery. In 1870, 72 percent of the wealthiest residents in the South had been born in the Confederacy. Even during Radical Reconstruction, there was little indication that Yankee carpetbaggers migrating from the North had come to dominate the pinnacle of the Southern wealth distribution. Moreover, the occupations of wealthy Southerners continued to tilt strongly toward landownership and agrarian pursuits. In 1870, two-thirds of the wealthiest Southerners were either planters or rentiers (that is, individuals with substantial landholdings who were not working the land themselves). The largest transformation in the postbellum South’s elite was not a shift away from native-born Southern whites or plantation owners, but from individuals who were actively involved in managing plantations to rentier capitalists, who preferred farm leasing or tenancy.

The discussion on page 99 faithfully represents one of the central tenets of the book – that the institutional transformation after slavery did not produce predictable shifts in class structure, but lingering uncertainty about the status hierarchy of the New South.

Learn more about Between Slavery and Capitalism at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth Dyson's "States, Debt, and Power"

Kenneth Dyson is Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Cardiff University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, States, Debt, and Power: 'Saints' and 'Sinners' in European History and Integration, and reported the following:

In the words of George Eliot: 'Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.' And so, in writing about debt, one must take history seriously. However, as my book argues, our thinking about debt had become entrapped within the mind-set of formal economic reasoning and mathematical modelling with the consequences that we blind ourselves to some of the most important characteristics of what Is as much a cultural and social as an economic phenomenon. Page 99 begins the process of unravelling the history of 'public' debt, challenging the prevalent notion that it was a invention of the modern territorial state - look instead at the city states of late medieval Europe. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Cardinal Richelieu, the borrowing capacity of states became the 'Archimedes principle that drives the world.' It became a key measure of the power of states. History also serves to highlight the sheer contingency of borrowing capacity, in a way that eludes formal economic reasoning and modelling. States, Debt, and Power draws on historical debt data from across Europe over much longer time frames than formal economics to reveal not just contingencies, above all the impacts of external and internal insecurity on public finances, but also some historical patterns in the rise and fall of state power. At the same time, reading the book offers insight into the dangers of thinking narrowly in terms of public debt. Historically, and today, so many of our debt problems are traceable to the private sector: to banks, households and companies. A key reason for great prudence in public finances is the vulnerability of states to the transfer of private debt to public accounts. The most vulnerable states are those with excessively bloated and poorly regulated financial sectors, with high level of debt-fuelled domestic consumption, linked to cultures addicted to consumer affluence - and, of course, states whose security is at risk. Historically, political elites have failed to exercise due diligence in ensuring prudence in the face of these vulnerabilities. As States, Debt, and Power argues, political elites - and the publics, financiers, and academic analysts and commentators who are supposed to hold them to account - are prone to illusion, hubris and complacency about finances. The current debt crisis is just another manifestation of an historic problem....

Learn more about States, Debt, and Power at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Dolnick's "The Rush"

Edward Dolnick is the author of The Clockwork Universe, The Forger's Spell, Down the Great Unknown and the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications.

Dolnick applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853, and reported the following:

The key to the Gold Rush story, the single most important fact of the whole saga, is that Americans in 1849 had never experienced such a thing. Everyone knew that the world could fall apart overnight. What no one imagined was that good news could arrive just as suddenly.

And then it did! When the president himself declared that all the rumors were true – California’s gold was real! – tens of thousands of young men quit their jobs, abandoned their families, and set off for the gold fields.

They had not the least notion of what they were in for. Once across the Missouri River, one historian wrote, “civilization ended and the Middle Ages began.” And, because the trip was expensive, lots of emigrants were clerks or lawyers or doctors, greenhorns rather than outdoorsmen. They shot one another by accident. Their mules ran off. They tried to cross a river and drowned. They tried to take a shortcut and starved.

My goal in The Rush was to capture their voices and make vivid what it was like to live in a world that had, without warning, turned upside down. Page 99 finds us poised on the brink. A handful of restless young men lament their cramped fates.

From page 99:

In Wisconsin, teenaged Lucius Fairchild could hardly bear to think that he was stuck behind the counter of his father’s store, “showing rags to the ladies of Madison.” Rural life was no better. In Mark Twain’s Hannibal and in countless towns like it, “the day was a dead and empty thing,” despite all the era’s talk of progress. The sun beat down, a fly buzzed against a window, the town drunk rolled over, life drowsed on.

Then came the astonishing news and the stampede to the gold fields. The lure was money, beyond a doubt, but freedom played nearly as large a role. You didn’t have to follow behind a horse for the rest of your life or copy legal forms in an office or live under your father-in-law’s thumb. You could leap out of the rut that fate had assigned to you. If you had nerve and luck and ambition, you could get rich.

This was new in American history, and astonishing. The Declaration of Independence had given every American the right to pursue happiness. The gold rush promised the chance to catch it.

Learn more about the book and author at Edward Dolnick's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Forger's Spell.

The Page 99 Test: The Clockwork Universe.

--Marshal Zeringue

David Thunder's "Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life"

David Thunder has been a research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Spain, since September 2012. Prior to moving to Spain, Thunder served as a visiting assistant professor at Bucknell University and at Villanova University, in addition to completing two years of postdoctoral research – one year at the Witherspoon Institute and the other in Princeton University's James Madison Program. His work has appeared in publications such as the American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Thunder applied the “Page 99 Test” to his recent book, Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life, and reported the following:

The central goal of the book, as stated in its preface, is "to rehabilitate an ethically grounded ideal of citizenship and public service, one that refuses to separate political endeavors from the quest for human excellence" (xi). Classical authors, such as Plato and Aristotle, viewed all domains of human action as expressive - at least, ideally - of the agent's commitment to live a decent or worthy human life. Modern thinkers, such as Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, have tended to insulate political action from citizens' ethical and/or religious ideals, in the name of liberty, public order, toleration, or public reason. Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life challenges this modern effort to "quarantine" political reasoning from fundamental ethical commitments - associated in recent times with thinkers such as Rawls, Niebuhr, and Walzer - and attempts instead to develop an "integrationist" vision of citizenship that permits citizens to give full play to their deepest ethical commitments in their role as citizens and public officials. The motivation for this project is my convictions that the insulation of public life from citizens' ethical commitments puts in jeopardy not only our integrity as persons but also the legitimacy and moral resilience of our political communities.

One version of the modern separationist approach, John Rawls's, comes in for criticism for its attempt to rule out "conceptions of the good" as legitimate grounds for political action. I critique several of Rawls's arguments for this position, but on page 99 specifically, I address Rawls's argument that conceptions of the good are illicitly biased toward the subject's interests. My reply is that

[g]iven Rawls's rather permissive understanding of conceptions of the good, it is far from obvious that they can be treated indiscriminately as sources of illicit bias in the selection of principles of justice, analogous to social status, wealth, or race. While some conceptions of the good, such as that of the single-minded hedonist or careerist, are patently self-serving, others, such as that of the educator or human rights campaigner, may be sincerely oriented toward a worthy human life, which might involve, among other things, the creation of a better and more just social order for all. While we might preemptively rule out narrowly self-serving conceptions of the good as irrelevant to the principles of justice, it is much less obvious why we should rule out more other-oriented, caring conceptions of the good as valuable and relevant sources of insight.

Learn more about Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life and its author at David Thunder's website and the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward H. Carpenter's "Steven Pressfield's 'The Warrior Ethos'"

Edward H. Carpenter is a Marine officer who has served around the world, from Afghanistan to Indonesia. With a Master’s degree from the Naval Postgraduate School, he has taught International Relations as an adjunct professor for the University of Maryland University College, speaks French and Indonesian, has written for the Marine Corps Gazette and published several works of fiction.

He recently applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Steven Pressfield’s “The Warrior Ethos”: One Marine Officer’s Critique and Counterpoint, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test works well to showcase the counterpoint that makes up the second half of the book, but to set the stage, it’s important to touch upon the critique that forms the first part of my work.

Steven Pressfield is best known for his historical fiction such as Gates of Fire, but in 2011 he wrote a short book titled The Warrior Ethos that was selected by the Commandant of the Marine Corps as a “must-read” book for all Marines. That’s unfortunate, because the basis for Pressfield’s proposed ethos are ancient Greek cultures (specifically the Spartans and Alexander the Great’s Macedonians) and modern tribal societies such as the Afghan Pashtuns.

From these exemplars, he makes a case that a Warrior Ethos is a necessary part of military culture, and that it should consist of courage, selflessness, love of comrades, and willingness to endure adversity. So far, so good, but his prescription for instilling these virtues is to use shame and an Americanized version of primitive “honor codes” which encourage belligerence, an “eye-for-an-eye” mentality, and exhort our young troops to “play hurt” and believe in “Death before Dishonor.”

It might be tempting to dismiss that as so much hot air, but he’s a convincing writer, and his words have had three years to work on thousands of young and impressionable minds; thus I spend the first part of the book debunking his fallacious lines of reasoning and holding up historical fact (from Plutarch, Herodotus, Thucydides, and others) against the often fictitious accounts that Pressfield cites to support his case.

I then posit a better answer to the questions of what a modern Warrior Ethos should consist of, and how best to develop it, which brings us to Page 99:

Finally, all warriors will benefit from fighting an enemy who knows that combat is a last resort; that on our side it will be hard-fought, but always within the laws of war, and that we will never inflict civilian casualties as a means of limiting our own.

Our enemy must know that if taken prisoner, they will be accorded their rights under international law and that if any member of our forces commits an atrocity, they will be prosecuted with fairness and transparency.

And our Nation must know that it can entrust its sons and daughters to our ranks; not to be broken down with shame, not to pumped up to “avenge every insult”, and not to suffer from high rates of sexual assault and suicide, but to be tested and tempered in the forges of our basic training curriculums with firmness, fairness and dignity, and to be led always by officers and NCOs who use the tools of empathy, education, and empowerment to set an example worthy of our enlightened age, so that whether a modern warrior serves four years or 30, that they return to civil life having grown as a person and having developed their abilities to lead, to follow, and to work as a member of a team.

This page neatly summarizes the desired outcome which can be obtained if we adopt an ethos based on something other than shame and misogynistic Bronze Age honor codes. Although it only captures the essence of the second half of the book, I believe it succeeds in revealing "the quality of the whole." All in all, I would consider this to be another success for the Page 99 Test!

Learn more about the book and author at Edward H. Carpenter's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Pattison's "The Morality of Private War"

James Pattison is a Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Morality of Private War: The Challenge of Private Military and Security Companies, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book is concerned with a specific issue – whether we should oppose the use of private military and security contractors, such as Blackwater contractors in Iraq, because they cannot be morally required to make the ultimate sacrifice. It is sometimes suggested that, unlike soldiers in the regular armed forces who explicitly consent to sacrifice themselves, private contractors do not take the vow of self-sacrifice. This is problematic, the argument runs, because it can undermine military effectiveness.

The book in general provides a critique of the privatisation of military force. I argue that there are numerous ethical problems with relying on private military and security companies (PMSCs). These problems, I suggest, are not simply ones that can be addressed by improving the currently weak regulation of the private military and security industry. One of the key aims of the book is to argue that there are deeper problems with the use of these firms, such as their undermining of democratic control, the weakening of military effectiveness, and the problematic motives of private contractors. These problems mean that we should oppose generally the use of private military and security companies. If we are to fight wars, it is better that we use the regular military to do so.

However, on page 99 I do not actually agree with the objection to private contractors under question. In the section in which this page is located, I argue that private contractors may sometimes be morally permissibly forced to take on the risks of war. This is because they may consent to do so, like regular soldiers. But I go further than this. Perhaps controversially, I suggest that

even if private contractors do not consent to risky operations, it might still sometimes be permissible to coerce them to act, if this is feasible. Most generally, it can be permissible to force individuals to save the lives of others, even without their consent.

Why can we force people to take on great risks, even without their consent? Could I point a gun to your head and force you to enter into a burning building to save 20 small children who would otherwise die, against your wishes, with a high risk of death for you? In the case of 20 children, I’m not sure. But suppose that now you could save 500 children. Could I force you to save them? I argue that you could. What this means is that, even if private contractors do not consent to being subject to risks, they might still justifiably be forced to fight and to take on great risks, if doing so will save many lives. For instance, if commanders in Iraq were in a situation where they could have forced private security contractors to save the lives of many innocent Iraqi civilians, they should have done so, even if the contractors did not agree to this.

Even though I suggest that there is not a major difference between private contractors and regular soldiers in terms of whether they can be sacrificed, more generally this section argues that there is a related problem in terms of private contractors that means that we should favour regular soldiers. The problem is that it is very hard to ensure that, even if private contractors do consent to take on risk operations, they will in fact do so. They may refuse to take on justifiable military operations to which they sign up, and this can undermine military effectiveness. The state employing the services of the firm has far fewer means to ensure contractors will act than when it relies on the regular military. This, I suggest, is one of several problems with the use of private military and security companies.

Visit James Pattison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Stephen Sartori's "Liberalism in Empire"

Andrew Stephen Sartori is Associate Professor of History at NYU, author of Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (2008), and coeditor (with Samuel Moyn) of Global Intellectual History (2013).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History, and reported the following:

My book is a vernacular history of colonial liberalism that moves beyond the more familiar terrain of self-conscious political thought to explore the movement of liberal ideas about freedom and property not only in terms of their compatibility with the interests of capital, but also in terms of their capacity to ground a critique of capital and empire. Page 99 of Liberalism in Empire brings us into the early stages of a debate in 1850s Bengal about the legal standing of peasants contracting to cultivate indigo on their holdings for European planters. Those sympathetic to the peasants argued that the cultivators were not employees because both parties to the contract were independent capitals engaged in commercial exchange. Intensified by the deepening of the peasant discontent that had occasioned it, this debate provided the immediate occasion for a wider set of claims about the social status of the Bengali cultivator: namely, that peasants were independent producers with a customary claim to an interest in the soil. Its most radical champions understood the authority of custom to be grounded not merely in prescriptive authority, but in the rational foundation of a history of labor. At stake here was a very radical claim: that the customary order of agrarian society in Bengal was in fact primordially a civil society based on the property-constituting powers of labor – and correlatively, that colonial law was answerable to the rational normative underpinnings of that society. Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its emergence, this liberal discourse of custom resonated with the demands of indigo-cultivating peasants to be released from obligations to continue cultivating the plant so as to be able to participate more extensively, more equitably and more profitably in practices of commodity exchange. The cultivator demand to be recognized as an independent producer of commodities provided a framework for the incorporation of the Lockean premises of the liberal discourse of custom into the increasingly articulate peasant politics of the early twentieth century. The insistence on the property-constituting power of labor, and on its normative significance for political life, would come to be deeply ingrained in both explicitly secular movements for the rights of cultivators and tenants, and explicitly religious movements for the rights of Bengali Muslims – and in this way it would play a significant role in shaping the popularity of the Pakistan demand in the Bengal countryside in the 1940s.

Learn more about Liberalism in Empire at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David P. Baker's "The Schooled Society"

David P. Baker is Professor of Education and Sociology, and a research scientist at the Center for the Study of Higher Education and the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University. He is coauthor of National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling with Gerald LeTendre, and a frequent contributor to scholarly journals on education.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Schooled Society: The Educational Transformation of Global Culture, and reported the following:

“Ice Cream, Women’s Studies, and the MBA.” If you look at Page 99 of The Schooled Society you’ll find the first page of Chapter 5, which is titled “Constructing Reality: Ice Cream, Women’s Studies, and the MBA.” Just below this trio, you’ll find a quote that prefaces the body of the chapter and captures the essence of the book.

From the fuel economy of cars to getting pregnant, from stealth technology in war to teenage rebellion [all are] to be understood in a day-to-day basis around basic natural-scientific understandings. The process at work here is the reverse of that which gave rise to the applied sciences over the century. In [that] case, society penetrated university sciences ... now [university] sciences penetrate society.
--David Frank and Jay Gabler, Reconstructing the University (2006)

Rather than thinking of education as the systematic discovery or rote memorization of knowledge, I argue that we should think of education as an institution that penetrates and changes broader society. While universities responded to outside forces, they also independently invent new fields of study that shape culture and our shared sense of meaning that in turn reshape other institutions of society. For example, the popular fields in Women’s Studies and Business Administration in the latter half of the 20th century were more a creation of an academic process in conjunction with social trends, than the university just responding to outside social change. In doing so, universities legitimated these fields and changed society. As a field, Women’s Studies helped foster new knowledge and changed conceptions of equity and changed the way we talk and think about gender—leading to the founding of new academic departments around the world.

Similarly, universities created the Master’s in Business Administration degree. The MBA has, in turn, become part of the formalization of knowledge in the fields of business and economics, in a sense making the language of theoretical behavioral and social science its basic paradigm for management of large organizations of all kinds. The effects of business education even reach to the way we think about how we should run non-profits, public services, and governments (the credibility of business leaders such as Mitt Romney and Michael Bloomberg as qualified stewards of our governments comes to mind).

These are just two examples of the effects of education on our society. Throughout the book I explore how over the last century, education has become an institution that affects health, economics, religion, and politics around the world. We often forget that only 100 years ago, most of the world’s population was illiterate. As education has become universal, the positive effects of education have spread across the globe—and the world is a better place because of it.

Learn more about The Schooled Society at the Stanford University Press website and David Baker's research website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jason McGraw's "The Work of Recognition"

Jason McGraw is associate professor of history at Indiana University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship, and reported the following:

Page 99 represents something of a pause in the main action of my book, as well as a turning point in the story I tell about the consequences of slave emancipation in Colombia.

The skinny on my book is that emancipation in 1851-1852 led people to fundamentally reconsider the meanings and practices of citizenship. For the majority of the population, already free when the remaining slaves were liberated, the event heralded expansive new rights, civil equality, and a rethinking of hierarchies and prejudices. Many social relations seemed up for renegotiation, including those in marriage, the market economy, the Catholic church, and partisan politics. By putting emancipation to other (universalizing) uses, however, the freedom struggles of former slaves and their allies went unacknowledged. Moreover, by the 1880s, conservatives as well as many liberals and former abolitionists had cast their lot with order-and-morality to counter both legal equality and the continuing agitations of plebeian citizens.

Page 99 is the first page of chapter four, “The Lettered Republic.” The chapters that precede and follow it focus on labor, religious, and political struggles on the country’s Caribbean coast, whereas here the perspective is a “national” one of rarified literature and law that emanated from Bogotá, the country’s capital. It also brings the story to Candelario Obeso (1849-1884), a poet, civil servant, and one of only two men of African descent with a national reputation in nineteenth-century Colombia. (Roughly one-quarter of the country’s population was, and is, of African descent.) It was Obeso, through published critiques of the lettered republic’s exclusion of black men, who inspired me to write about citizenship as the problem of emancipation.

Page 99 begins with epigraphs that exemplify the larger story of race in the book. The first epigraph from Obeso presages what W.E.B. DuBois would call the double-consciousness of black people’s perception of themselves through white contempt. The second epigraph, also from Obeso, mocks the belief in racial whitening in the context of Latin American mestizaje (race mixing), which requires the demonization of blackness:

Because you see me the skin
The color of ink
Perhaps you believe that
My soul is also black?…
—Candelario Obeso, Cantos Populares de Mi Tierra [Popular Songs of My Land], 1877

All the others are sickly and of an ambiguous race. Their endeavor is to be white and pretty. For me, it is an honor to be black and my ugliness delights me. Human regeneration is in my race. Science has already said this.
—Candelario Obeso, Lecturas Para Ti [Readings for You], 1878

Page 99’s final epigraph is from a contemporary of Obeso who misinterprets the deceased poet’s critiques by accusing him of a life-long obsession with white women (for which there is no historical evidence):

Obeso was an Othello without a Desdemona who would love him.
—José María Rivas Groot, La Lira Nueva [The New Lyre], 1886

This final quote illuminates the turning point in the book, where the ruling class disavowal of Obeso’s demands for recognition stands as a metonym for the wider rejection of the democratic challenges it faced after emancipation.

Learn more about The Work of Recognition at The University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Elswit's "Watching Weimar Dance"

Kate Elswit is an academic, curator, and dancer who has published widely on dance and theatre history, performance theory, practice-as-research, and cultural studies. She teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Bristol, and her recent performance projects include Future Memory (as dramaturg with choreographer Rani Nair). Among her awards are the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars, the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research, a Marshall Scholarship, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Watching Weimar Dance, and reported the following:

Watching Weimar Dance is about the strange things people claimed to see on stage during the Weimar Republic. I posit that spectator accounts archive not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the theatre to negotiate pressing social issues. Page 99 is early in chapter 4, “The Politics of Watching: Staging Sacrifice Across the Atlantic,” which looks at how viewing itself functioned as a form of political activity at a turning point for Germany. The page introduces one of the two performances on which the chapter focuses: the ambitious 1930 multimedia spectacle Totenmal that was a collaboration between choreographer Mary Wigman and Swiss poet Albert Talhoff, among others.

Totenmal’s invocation of the World War I dead was meant to be “apolitical” even though it has retrospectively been read in light of the rise of German fascism. Soon after, Wigman toured her dance cycle Opfer around the United States, including a solo from Totenmal. Chapter 4 compares divergent audience responses on both sides of the Atlantic to these two late Weimar-era performances that addressed themes of sacrifice and human fate. In it, I ask not what the performances categorically “were,” but what audiences allowed them to be. By focusing on the ideologies of reception, including the multiple models of community in play and the power of underreading, I locate the politics of dance in how spectators worked out meaning in relation to the world around them.

What I find compelling about Totenmal are the terms on which it went so wrong for so many commentators. For example, the main National Socialist paper was highly suspicious, because the piece’s utopian tendencies were suggestive of the old, rather than the new, right. Likewise, no fewer than twelve reviews charged Talhoff with being a “dilettante,” which signified something very specific. To bring a reader along with me into the particularities of such responses, I need to first set up the vision for the event and how it materialized on stage. Page 99 begins to describe the features of Totenmal’s total work of art—a “dramatic-choric vision for word dance light” as it was advertised—including the light altars and the various dance and recitation roles of the sixty performers. To underscore the scale of the project, it also includes a sketch for the purpose-built space in Munich that seated 1600 spectators per night.

Visit Kate Elswit's website.

--Marshal Zeringue