Toby Matthiesen's "The Other Saudis"

Toby Matthiesen is a Research Fellow in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He was previously a Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Matthiesen applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism, and reported the following:

Excerpt from page 99:

Discussion sessions held in private raised the importance of intellectual change in the Islamic umma and criticised the traditional Shia trends. The taped sermons and pamphlets of Muhammad al-Shirazi were widely circulated. Young clerics such as Hasan al-Saffar increasingly preached to larger audiences in hussainiyyat and at Shia religious festivities. Recruitment focussed on high school and university students but some teachers and graduates were also brought into the Saudi movement soon after its inception. The presence of young preachers was a novelty and resonated well with the youth. One later member of the movement from Awwamiyya recalls that his father, who was an Akhbari, would not take him to the hussainiyya and if he went himself he would be sent home because of his age. In contrast, the teenagers felt taken more seriously by the young preachers such as the al-Sayf brothers and al-Saffar.

While virtually all the clerical OIRAP leadership passed through the hawza in Kuwait, some of the later lay cadres, who were called the effendiyya within the movement, stayed in Saudi Arabia. Hamza al-Hasan, who became a key figure in the movement later on, was recruited in 1976/77. Until the intifada, however, he did not join the hawza in Kuwait and just met and discussed movement literature with his supervisor from his hometown, Safwa. Until 1979 al-Hasan did not know how many members the movement had and only during the intifada did he become aware of the full extent of mobilisation.

Young unmarried women between fifteen and twenty were also recruited. One female activist recalls how her relative returned from Kuwait around 1977 and told her about the Islamic awakening. He said that time was ripe for change and gave her books and articles to distribute to her cousins and friends and she started to gather with them.
Copyright © 2015 Toby Matthiesen. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

On page 99 of The Other Saudis, I outline how in the mid-1970s a new social movement altered the political landscape of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The province is the centre of the oil industry, and in the 1950s and 1960s, political protest had taken the form of labour mobilisations and Arab nationalist activism. Shia Muslims, who are a discriminated minority in Saudi Arabia but make up roughly half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Province, had until the 1970s either joined leftist and Arab nationalist movements, or had tried to secure more rights through petitioning the Al Saud ruling family (and The Other Saudis devotes one chapter each to the petitions by the notable families as well as the leftist movements). But in the 1970s, a grass-roots Islamist social movement, called the Shirazi movement after its founder Muhammad Mahdi al-Shirazi, spread from Iraq down the Gulf coast to Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

I have made dozens of interviews with Shirazi activists and cadres, and they explained to me how in the 1970s they started to preach amongst young Shia men and women, mainly amongst teenagers, and encouraged them to revolt against their own political elite, the Shia urban notable families, as well as against the state dominated by the ruling family. The networks of the movement concentrated on a religious school in Kuwait, a hawza, where young Saudis went for indoctrination courses in the holidays and some stayed on to become full-time religious students and members of the movement.

This mobilisation eventually culminated in the 1979 uprising in the Eastern Province, during which young Shia militants took over the city of Qatif and surrounding villages, and fought off the National Guard for days. But the uprising was eventually crushed, dozens were killed, and hundreds of Shirazi activists went into exile to Iran and Syria, initiating a decade of confrontation between the Saudi Shia and the Saudi state that was to last until the Gulf War of 1990/91. Facing a fresh challenge by Sunni Islamists, who saw the deployment of American troops on Saudi soil to prepare the "liberation" of Kuwait as sacrilege, the ruling family started to see the Shia as temporary allies and negotiated an amnesty agreement with the Shia opposition, leading to their return in 1993.

Visit Toby Matthiesen's website.

Writers Read: Toby Matthiesen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tom Chaffin's "Giant's Causeway"

Tom Chaffin is the author, most recently, of Giant's Causeway: Frederick Douglass's Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. His other books include Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire and Met His Every Goal: James K. Polk and the Legends of Manifest Destiny. His writings also have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Time, Harper's, the Oxford American, and other publications. He is also a frequent contributor to the New York Times' acclaimed "Disunion" series on the American Civil War. He lives in Atlanta.

Chaffin applied the “Page 99 Test” to Giant's Causeway and reported the following:

Drawing on primary source documents, many heretofore unpublished, Giant's Causeway chronicles Frederick Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of the British Isles, his first venture into foreign climes. For Douglass, the trip, particularly its four months in Ireland, marked, in myriad ways, a new beginning. The tour accelerated his transformation from more than a teller of his own life-story into a commentator on contemporary issues. Challenges in Ireland, Scotland and England also encouraged and prepared him for his transition from a salaried lecturer—financially and ideologically bound to his early mentor William Lloyd Garrison — to independent writer and editor, eventually with his own newspaper and vision of America's future. The book also examines the lasting impact of the tour on Douglass's career, as well as his subsequent interactions with Ireland and Irish America.

Page 99 of Giant's Causeway recounts a brief visit by Douglass to Birmingham, England, to attend a temperance meeting. He had been long scheduled to lecture at the meeting, but to fulfill the commitment had to interrupt an extended stay in Belfast, Ireland, where he was giving multiple lectures on abolition, and travel, successively by ship and rail, to Birmingham.

The Birmingham interlude typified, in many ways, the trials faced by Douglass during the tour as he sought to juggle philosophical commitments—in this case abolitionism and temperance. His ties to Garrison—by then, even among abolitionists, a controversial figure—were also becoming burdensome: Depending upon the individual, as Douglass was increasingly discovering, the Boston abolitionist's name could prompt either good-will or suspicions.

Page 99 finds Douglass and his Birmingham host, Garrison ally William Boultbee, on the eve of the temperance meeting, as they call on some of its prominent organizers—beginning with John Angell James, a local Congregationalist minister and social reformer.

"I found him not only cold toward me—-but absolutely suspicious of me." But mere coldness plummeted into iciness after James inquired, "if I came recommended, and if I belonged to the Garrison party in America [and] Whither I was a member of any Church-—and if any to what Church."

"I told him," Douglass answered, "I was not a member of any Church—and that I belonged to the Garrison party—and that I had credentials."

James, according to Douglass, answered, "I understand," then alluded vaguely to "the different antislavery parties in the United States."

Afterward, Douglass and Boultbee visited Joseph Sturge, then in his early fifties, the Quaker founder of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. During their meeting, Sturge-—likely out of a sense of obligation to Richard Webb-—invited the visiting American to dine with him the following day. Even so, Douglass felt an aloofness from Sturge "amounting to coldness."

Finally, before the day's end, Douglass and Boultbee called on John Cadbury, forty-five years old, a prominent Quaker abolitionist and prosperous chocolate manufacturer. Unlike Sturge, Cadbury greeted Douglass warmly. But Cadbury also soon admitted that, as an organizer of the temperance meeting, fearing that Douglass would not attend, "he had left my name off the bill."

The temperance meeting convened that evening in Birmingham's town hall. "It is a splendid building-—said to hold 7,000 people," Douglass soon wrote. The room, however, was "not full"; moreover Douglass sensed an unwelcoming indifference from the society's officers seated at the front of the hall. "They acted for a long time as though I were not there-—and as though they had not invited me."

Hours passed. "Six or seven speeches had been made—-The interest of the meeting was on the decline. We had been together nearly three hours—-a strong current set toward the door. At this moment the committee-—as if waked by-—a clap from the sky-—turned to me, and asked me to second a resolution." Moments later, as Douglass walked toward the platform at the hall's front, audience members who had been heading for the door, returned to their seats. To cheers and applause, he spoke for twenty-five minutes. When he sat down, to his delight, cries of "go, on" filled the hall.

The following day, Douglass dined with Joseph Sturge, who, following Douglass's oratorical triumph the previous evening, was now engaged and friendly. Before leaving Birmingham, he also bid farewell to his host: "Father Boutlbee—-is a fine old man, he cried like a child when I left. God bless him in his declining years."


Returning to Belfast on December 19, Douglass resumed his lecturing. Even as he relentlessly criticized Protestants churches, his orations-—dashing earlier fears among some of his sponsors—were proving wildly popular.

Learn more about Giant's Causeway at Tom Chaffin's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julie-Marie Strange's "Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914"

Julie-Marie Strange is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester, UK and author of Death, Grief and Poverty, 1870-1914.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914, and reported the following:

Page 99 falls in the introduction to Chapter 2, ‘Love and Want: Unemployment, Failure and the Fragile Father’ and draws attention to the way in which scholars in the western world have tended to focus on male unemployment as the motor to family breakdown, domestic violence and women and children’s shame. Using men and children’s testimonies of paternal unemployment in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period, the chapter considers how men and children gave meaning to fatherhood when fathers could not ‘provide’ and explores how men sought to compensate for ‘failure’ as breadwinners by making myriad other sacrifices, such as deskilling, going ‘on the tramp’, and performing domestic work and childcare tasks. In particular, the chapter focuses on unemployed men’s refusal of food in favor of redistributing nutritional resources to wives and children as symptomatic of the extent of the unemployed father’s self recrimination and guilt.

The chapter considers the degree to which men and children incorporated failure into unemployed fathers’ identities. The chapter also contends that in an interpersonal context, fatherhood as a category could possess sufficient elasticity to absorb the unemployed man. This complicated unemployed men’s status as ‘failures’ to posit a gentler conception of unemployed fathers as ‘fragile’.

The chapter reflects the concern of the book: to shift historical conceptions of working-class fatherhood in the western world away from a ‘deficit’ model of fatherhood that focuses on men primarily as (unreliable) providers, paternal absence and the abuse of male power towards an understanding of how men and children invest meaning in fatherhood as a changing relationship and process over the life cycle.

Learn more about Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Don H. Doyle's "The Cause of All Nations"

Don H. Doyle is the McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. The author of several books, including Faulkner's County and Nations Divided, he lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Cause of All Nations lands readers on a major point I wanted my book to make. America’s Civil War really mattered to the rest of the world. Political leaders, journalists, intellectuals, workers, students, and reformers watched from abroad as the “once United States” descended into fratricidal war, some in horror, some with delight.

This page gives voice to those in the European aristocracy who were saying “I told you so.” People can’t govern themselves without eventually falling into anarchy or despotism. That was the lesson of the French Revolution, and now the lesson of America’s “experiment” in democracy. I quote Madrid’s El Pensamiento Español, a Catholic journal, whose indictment was especially vitriolic:

“In the model republic of what were the United States, we see more and more clearly of how little account is a society constituted without God, merely for the sake of men.... Look at their wild ways of annihilating each other, confiscating each other’s goods, mutually destroying each other’s cities, and cordially wishing each other extinct!”

What page 99 omits are the other voices of despair, outrage, and hope among those who saw the Great Republic as living proof that democracy actually worked, that people could live together in peace and prosperity on principles of equality and liberty.

One of my favorite people in the book was a history professor in Paris with the magnificent name of Édouard-René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye. “So long as there shall be across the Atlantic a society of thirty millions of men, living happily and peacefully under a government of their choice, with laws made by themselves,” he wrote in 1864, “liberty will cast her rays over Europe like an illuminating pharos.... But should liberty become eclipsed in the new world, it would become night in Europe”

It was Laboulaye who at the end of America’s war devised an idea for a monument to “Liberty enlightening the world.” A photograph at the end of my book shows the Statue of Liberty, still under construction, towering above the streets of Paris. Today, in a time of terror and fear, that image seems to me an especially poignant reminder that Laboulaye and other foreigners saw America’s struggle as their own, the cause of all nations.

Visit The Cause of All Nations Facebook page, and learn more about the book at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kathryn Gin Lum's "Damned Nation"

Kathryn Gin Lum is Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Department in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. She is affiliated with American Studies, Asian American Studies, and History (by courtesy).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her 2014 book, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, and reported the following:

Damned Nation tries to understand how belief in hell shaped the personal and political lives of Americans in the first century of nationhood. What did it mean to really believe in hell—to believe that you yourself, your loved ones, or even the vast majority of humans might end up in the fiery pit forever? How would that fear shape the way you lived in the day-to-day, interacted with others, and thought about your place in the world?

The book argues that although Americans liked to think of themselves as a “redeemer nation,” the fear that they might be damned instead—individually and collectively—animated them to worried action on behalf of themselves and others. The argument unfolds in three parts: the first looks at the survival of the doctrine in the late eighteenth century and at how it was preached in pulpits and in print; the second considers lay responses to the terrifying prospect of eternal torment; and the third looks at the deployment of the threat of hell in the slavery controversy and the Civil War.

Page 99 falls in the middle of Part Two. Prior to this point, we’ve seen how ministers used fire-and-brimstone sermons to urge American audiences to repent immediately in order to be saved. But lay believers recognized that life took many turns beyond the immediate moment of conversion, and that staying out of hell necessitated constant monitoring of even the most mundane of daily activities. Advice guides taught ordinary people how to live in order to be saved. Crucial to the soul-saving enterprise was the “right apportionment of time”: individuals had to make sure they didn’t waste time reading “bad books,” or frittering away the evening dancing or playing cards. They always had to be on guard lest death strike suddenly.

Women were held especially responsible for safeguarding the eternal welfare of their loved ones. They were supposed to efficiently manage their household’s schedule to ensure that their husbands and children did not neglect quiet time reading the Bible and analyzing the state of their souls. As in the rest of the book, page 99 joins public and private writings and the personal with the political. It begins with Catharine Beecher’s advice in her popular Treatise on Domestic Economy and ends with Martha Laurens Ramsay’s anxieties as recorded in her diary.

From Page 99:

…Just as women would be held accountable for the ‘right apportionment of time’ at an individual level, [Beecher] wrote, so they must also “use [their] influence and example to promote the discharge of the same duty by others…. If, by late breakfasts, irregular hours for meals, and other hinderances of this kind, she interferes with, or refrains from promoting regular industry in others, she is accountable to God for all the waste of time consequent on her negligence.” Even the most mundane affairs took on eternal import when viewed through the lens of accountability. Families, communities, and even the nation were to be formed along the same industrious lines as the saved individual. Antebellum Protestants did not emphasize discipline for the sole purpose of molding good workers, even if that was not an unwelcome side effect. Discipline freed the time needed to devote to their own and others’ salvation in the midst of their busy lives….

Women were often at the forefront of lay efforts at saving souls. Even as Martha Ramsay daily struggled to find personal peace, she also worried that the cares of everyday life imperiled her loved ones’ eternal welfare. In September 1795, she asked God for “the thorough conversion of a very near and dear friend” and “that my dear husband may be preserved from worldly entanglements, and enabled so to manage his earthly affairs, that they may never interfere with his heavenly business.”…

Learn more about Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction at the Oxford University Press website.

Cover story: Damned Nation.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stuart B. Schwartz's "Sea of Storms"

Stuart B. Schwartz is the George Burton Adams Professor of History and chair of the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale University. His many books include All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Sea of Storms catches a major turning point in the history of governmental response to natural disasters. The year 1780 created an extraordinary challenge for all the nations and colonies of the Caribbean. In that year, eight hurricanes made landfall in the region, among them the "Great" hurricane, the deadliest storm in the history of the Caribbean. Until the late 18th century, most countries and European empires had left disaster relief to the Church or to private charities, but this storm had roared up the chain of the Lesser Antilles during the American Revolution for independence when the Caribbean was awash with Spanish, English, and French ships and troops. The storm killed over 30,000 people, destroyed whole fleets, disrupted commerce, and along with the other storms, devastated the slave-based plantation economies of Martinique, Jamaica, Barbados and other islands. For the first time England's Parliament, realizing that the plantation economies had to be restored, sent significant funds for disaster relief to its colonies, fearing that not to do so might lead the discontented island colonies to join the continental rebels. As page 99 shows, the French governor of Martinique took a similar position, writing to Paris: "In this dreadful circumstance, it was absolutely necessary to distribute relief to the victims."

The great hurricane of 1780 and the other storms of that year proved to be a point of departure. Decisions in that year about governmental responsibility in the face of calamity had been shaped by politics as well as moral and charitable concerns, and that would become a recurrent aspect of the ways in which governments would respond to communal catastrophes thereafter. The questions generated by such intervention: are disasters a private or public matter? is disaster relief a basic human right? who should benefit from relief? and how can it be best provided without creating dependency or moral hazard? have remained at the heart of a debate that still rages today.

Learn more about Sea of Storms at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Udi Greenberg's "The Weimar Century"

Udi Greenberg is assistant professor of history at Dartmouth College.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Weimar Century: German Emigres and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War, and reported the following:

As it happens, Page 99 provides a snapshot of The Weimar Century’s broader story: how ideas and political traditions from Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-1933) became integral to American thought, institutions, and diplomacy in the early Cold War. The book charts the remarkable influence that German émigrés, who fled the Nazis to the United States and then became members of the American intellectual and diplomatic establishment, exerted on the construction of American global hegemony after World War II.

The page is part of a section that tells the surprising story of Ernst Fraenkel, a renowned Socialist émigré who (almost by accident) became a top official in the U.S. occupation of Southern Korea after World War II. In interwar Germany, Fraenkel had been a rising star in the Socialist Party who sought to bolster democratic institutions and welfare policies. Drawing on this experience as he surveyed Korea after the war, Fraenkel was profoundly convinced that a stable democracy could only flourish if it developed through broad government programs for social and economic development. He therefore utilized his influence in the U.S. embassy in Seoul to promote massive American investments in Korean agriculture, industry, labor organization, and education. Ironically, at the very time that growing American panic over perceived “subversive” Communism led to purge of liberals and Socialists at home, figures such as Fraenkel were able to promote Socialist agendas abroad.

Equally important, Fraenkel’s story shows how political traditions from Weimar also had dark and tragic consequences in the early Cold War. Like almost all Weimar Socialists, Fraenkel was fiercely anti-Communist, and he believed the Soviet Union to be the source of overwhelming evil. In the Korean peninsula, this long-standing anti-Communist phobia translated into energetic advocacy to terminate U.S.-Soviet cooperation, ultimately resulting in the formation of two hostile states and the division of the Korean peninsula. Indeed, Fraenkel’s belief in the impossibility of coexistence between democracy and global Communism was so intense that he never pondered the high price of Korea’s division—the breaking of families, the enshrinement of tension, and the permanent destruction of Korean unity. Page 99 thus encapsulates how German ideas helped both expand and harshly limit the postwar political imagination.

Learn more about The Weimar Century at Udi Greenberg's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judy Wajcman’s "Pressed for Time"

Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of several books on technology and culture, such as The Social Shaping of Technology, Feminism Confronts Technology and TechnoFeminism.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, and reported the following:

Page 99 does contain one of the major themes of my book, but only narrowly. It introduces a study I conducted on how multimodal digital connectivity affects knowledge workers. That is, how having 24/7 communication via mobile phones and the Internet affects how work is organised and performed. On page 99 there is a Table showing that the average duration of work episodes during the day is just under three minutes. But it is only in subsequent pages that I build an argument about the relationship between technology and how we interpret and use it.

You learn later in the chapter that while most communication is now mediated by technologies, it is not the technology itself that dictates the pace of work. For example, I argue that email and information overload have become symbolic of work stress. The fact that we feel the need to respond to email quickly is not due to the speed of data transmission, but because of collective norms that have built up about appropriate response times.

So page 99 does give the reader a sense of the broader themes of the book: our perception that the pace of life is faster than it used to be and that digital gadgets are to blame. That we live in an acceleration society, constantly feeling rushed and pressed for time. But the book critiques the idea that digital technologies are inexorable driving acceleration of everyday life.

If we feel pressed for time today, it is not because of technology per se, but because of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set. The contemporary imperative of speed is as much a cultural artifact as it is a technological one. Digital time is no different – ultimately it needs to be understood as a product of the ways in which humans use, interact with, and indeed build technology. If we want to take more control of our time, and feel less pressed for time, we must contest the imperative of speed.

Learn more about Pressed for Time at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Raphael Brewster Folsom's "The Yaquis and the Empire"

Raphael Brewster Folsom is assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Yaquis and the Empire: Violence, Spanish Imperial Power, and Native Resilience in Colonial Mexico, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The devil was everywhere in Jesuit writings about this period, a testament to the deep antagonism between the Jesuits and most of the Yaquis, and also to the vigorous persistence of non-Christian practices on the Yaqui mission. In one revealing passage, Pérez de Ribas described a Yaqui woman telling a Jesuit, “Father, look at the other side of the river; do you see how many hills, mountains, cliffs and peaks there are? In all of them, we had our superstitions; we revered all of them, and celebrated there.” The Yaquis invested the landscape with supernatural meanings, and the Jesuits were too few and too vulnerable to do much about it. The earliest accounts of the Yaqui mission told of sorcerers practicing black magic among the Yaqui people and conspiring to kill Jesuit missionaries. Satan appeared regularly among the Yaquis, sometimes in the form of an old man, sometimes as a young one. One Yaqui confessed that Satan had come to him in the form of a crow and had told him to kill all the Spaniards. Pérez de Ribas was so concerned about the devil’s grip on the Yaquis that he ordered a six-volume treatise on demonic magic by the Jesuit Martín del Río. After perusing it, he concluded that all the evil enchantments described in del Río’s book could be observed on the Yaqui mission. Indeed, Satan was so well established, and his cult had reached such heights of sophistication among the Yaquis, that it seemed that the devil had established an “endowed professorship” (cátedra) of the dark arts on the shores of the Yaqui River.

I couldn’t be happier with the results of this test. Page 99 begins with the heading, “The Devil and Yaqui Resistance.” Since the book is all about the relationships that came into existence between the Yaqui people of northern Mexico and the European representatives of the Spanish empire, this section is a good representative of the book as a whole. Jesuit missionaries first arrived among the Yaquis in 1617 under peculiar circumstances. The Yaquis had recently thrashed Spanish-led forces on the battlefield, not once or twice, but three times. Then, to the bafflement of the Spanish, the Yaquis sued for peace, offering fourteen Yaqui children to the Spanish as hostages, which was a common practice in northwest Mexico among native people who wanted to strike an alliance. The Spanish, in turn, offered Jesuits. There were still many Yaquis who did not want the Spanish as allies, and wanted Jesuits among them even less. So when the Jesuits arrived, they were horrified at the abundance of what they thought were Satanic practices. Andrés Pérez de Ribas, the lead missionary, claimed that Satan was so well established among the Yaquis that he had created an “endowed professorship” (cátedra) of the dark arts on the Yaqui River. The Jesuits were too few and too scared to destroy Yaqui religious practices. Over time, the Jesuits had a profound influence on spiritual life among the Yaquis. But “the Devil”—the Jesuit term for Yaqui adherence to ancient ritual practices—was never far off. Page 99 of The Yaquis & The Empire is a small but representative slice of a larger story about people of unimaginably disparate cultures learning to live together under circumstances of extreme violence and political turbulence. Fans of Brian Moore’s novel, Black Robe, and the wonderful movie of the same name, will find much of interest here. (In my humble opinion).

Learn more about The Yaquis and the Empire at the Yale University Press website.

Cover story: The Yaquis and the Empire.

--Marshal Zeringue

Srimati Basu's "The Trouble with Marriage"

Srimati Basu is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of She Comes to Take Her Rights: Indian Women, Property, and Propriety, the editor of Dowry and Inheritance (Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism series), and the coeditor of Conjugality Unbound: Sexual Economy and the Marital Form in India.

Basu applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Trouble with Marriage: Feminists Confront Law and Violence in India, and reported the following:

I was hoping that page 99 would contain one of the legal cases animating The Trouble with Marriage, which demonstrate the quotidian ways in which marriage, parenting, labor or care are shaped and contested. But page 99 has few words on it. It depicts life in the courtroom statistically and visually, dominated by an image of a confinement cell [inset, below left; click to enlarge ] and an analysis of court data. One may read these to reveal critical themes nonetheless.

Page 99 is part of Chapter 4, “Justice Without Lawyers?: Living the Family Court Experiment,” literally the core of this project. I read about the establishment of new Family Courts in India which would generally exclude lawyers, with the goal of enhancing people’s direct engagement with legal matters and providing a less alienating, more gender equality friendly space. My book began as a legal ethnography of the Kolkata courts, spanning a decade of fieldwork. It grew to encompass the governance of family law alongside that of domestic violence and rape, in courts and police stations and mediation organizations. But life in the Family Courts is the ethnographic center of the book, and page 99 appropriately brings us there, with considerations of whether the court has improved the speed of clearing cases. The broader contention of the chapter -- that set-aside courts for special issues can move cases along, but the new format still works through familiar forms of legal discipline and process – can be gleaned from the two brief paragraphs of text.

The confinement cell reminds us, similarly, that the idea of a new-style courtroom may be different from its materialization: the jail-like enclosure seems at odds with the notion of a comfortable, friendly space. The image is a reminder of my argument that these courts may have enhanced the unilateral power of judges in curbing that of lawyers, rather than empowering litigants. The cell typically houses poor men who might be jailed for failing to pay (or being unable to pay) maintenance: while husbands routinely default on maintenance, poorer men become symbols of the State’s serious intent. Women’s economic woes in marital trouble range across classes. The image also graphically conveys a point made in several chapters, that using the protective provisions of criminal law gives women some leverage against the disadvantages generated by gender-neutral civil marriage law; however, criminal law works through profoundly patriarchal notions of harm and reparation.

Learn more about The Trouble with Marriage at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue