Nicholas R. Jones's "Cervantine Blackness"

Nicholas R. Jones is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain, and coeditor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production.

Jones applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cervantine Blackness, and reported the following:

From page 99:

[…] palpitates and perspires an erotic life of desire. Things are done in secrecy—behind and within closed doors.

I have always been struck by the homosocial, queer bond between Loaysa and Luis. Critics have also noticed their intimate proximity. In Del teatro a la novela: El ritual del disfraz en las Novelas ejemplares de Cervantes, Eduardo Olid Guerrero highlights how Loaysa “attracts and seduces” Luis with his guitar and music. Alban K. Forcione also confirms similar interactions between the two in his 1982 classic Cervantes and the Humanist Vision. What strikes me as odd remains how and why scholars have acknowledged, on the one hand, yet have evaded, on the other hand, the explicit naming—calling out the social interaction and proximity for what it is—of the textual potential apparent in Loaysa’s and Luis’s interracial and same- gendered bond to each other throughout the novella. I cannot help but to explore the productive possibility of queering Luis in these terms, along the lines of the same-gender relations between white men and black men. Expanding on our understanding of how queerness ebbs and flows in El celoso extremeño, I gravitate toward Roland Betancourt’s important work on Byzantium, eunuchs, and institutionalized spaces, where homosocial, homoerotic, and same-gender intimacy had room to maneuver in certain cordoned-off, private, or homosocial spaces, even if they manifested differently than in our own time.

Quoting Eve Sedgwick’s classic definition of “queer,” Betancourt reiterates that queerness for Sedgwick moves as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excess of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” On queerness I privilege Robert Reid-Pharr’s framing of the term: “If there’s one thing that marks us as queer, a category that is somehow different, if not altogether distinct, from the heterosexual, then it is undoubtedly our relationships to the body, particularly the expansive ways in which we utilize and combine vaginas, penises, breasts, buttocks, hands, arms, feet, stomachs, mouths and tongues in our expressions of not only intimacy, love, and lust, but also and importantly shame, contempt, despair, and hate.” The diversity of textual material from El celoso extremeño that captures Luis’s and Loaysa’s connection and proximity to each other, through music, song, and dance, implore us to rethink Luis, through modes, spaces, and temporalities of queerness, in terms of vulnerability. Vincent Woodard in The Delectable Negro compels us to think about how “a master would often choose a ‘favorite’ male slave as the […].

On page 99 of Cervantine Blackness, readers will meet my closing remarks on book’s third meditation, “Rethinking Luis.” This meditation historicizes and unpacks the sociocultural range of blackness exhibited by the old, black eunuch Luis from the story El celoso extremeño (1613). To achieve this, I distill and make meaning out of the intersecting phenomena that BDSM and pornography, music, queerness, and sound harness in my study of blackness as a fecund space to think through the material consequences of Cervantes’s construction of Luis.

The Page 99 Test works beautifully and readers would get an excellent idea and sense of Cervantine Blackness. Uncannily, of the hundreds of pages in my book, page 99 is the very best single page to introduce browsers to the book’s core tenants. In short, the “test” absolutely serves as a good browser's shortcut to Cervantine Blackness, precisely because the book is deliberately irreverent, rambunctious, and wayward. Taking methodological cues from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Cervantine Blackness concerns itself with breaking open archival documentation—literary and otherwise—from Cervantes’s and his contemporaries’ worlds so that they might yield a richer picture of pre-Enlightenment Iberian black social life. Through vulnerability and risks, I prefer to think of Cervantine Blackness as a fugitive text, marked by the errantry with which it identifies and that it catalogs. In this spirit and in its queerness, I read against the grain and press at the limits of the historical and literary archives associated with Cervantes and those in his writerly orbit. Waywardness in this book speculates about what might have been. As a method, the wild ideas reverberating in this book reimagine blackness through Cervantes’s spirit of irony conveyed in writings—yet also his pulcritud, or neatly nuanced details—that simultaneously flicker before our eyes.

Learn more about Cervantine Blackness at the Penn State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Amogh Sharma's "The Backstage of Democracy"

Amogh Dhar Sharma is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Oxford Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. He has previously worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Modern South Asia Studies at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies and as a Stipendiary Lecturer in Politics at the Queen's College, Oxford. His research interests include comparative politics, political communication, and the political economy of development in South Asia.

Sharma applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them, and reported the following:

From page 99:

The Computer and the ‘Computer Boys’

After Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October 1984, Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as the PM, and two months later the party achieved a landslide victory in the general election. Although as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi had less time to devote to managing intra-party affairs, nonetheless data collection and computer-based analysis continued to form the two legs of his plan of professionalising the party. Assisting him in the process was a growing team of advisors comprising technocrats, civil servants and business and media professionals. In his speech at the INC centenary celebrations in Bombay in 1985, Gandhi lashed out at ‘power brokers’ in the INC and promised to purge them to strengthen the party (R. Gandhi 1985). To operationalise this plan, he turned to Sam Pitroda to prepare a detailed vision document charting out the course of reform in the party (Nugent 1990, 64–66; Pitroda and Chanoff 2015, 147). Satyanarayan Gangaram ‘Sam’ Pitroda was an engineer and entrepreneur who had returned to India from the US in the early 1980s. Soon after, he was appointed as Gandhi’s advisor on the government’s ‘technology missions’ and played a major role in India’s telecom revolution. A close confidant of Gandhi till the end, Pitroda also played a crucial role in managing the INC election campaigns in 1989 and 1991 (Merchant 1991, 283; Nugent 1990, 66; Pradhan 1995). Gandhi’s reliance on technocrats like Pitroda, who had no formal associations with the INC, was indicative of his suspicions about the efficacy of most party bureaucrats and his tendency to bypass the party’s organisational machinery in the hopes of eventually reforming it.

Soon after being elected as the PM, Rajiv Gandhi introduced a programme for creating a computerised database of all members of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha. In September 1985, a pro forma was circulated among all INC MPs asking them to provide details of their educational qualifications, tax history, language proficiency, marital status, number of children, countries visited by them, previous membership of political parties, history of association with the INC, public meetings and rallies addressed by them in their constituency, nature and duration of visits to their constituency and their participation in parliamentary proceedings. A similar technique of computerised data collection had previously been trialled among MPs and MLAs in Bihar. The purported aim of this exercise was to provide Gandhi with easily accessible information about all INC MPs ‘at the push of a button’, in the hope that ‘[t]his [would] help remove groupism and prejudiced selection[s]’ in the formation of parliamentary select committees. In other words, the INC computer was to act both as a virtual panopticon that could…

It appears that the Page 99 Test only partially works for The Backstage of Democracy. While the excerpt certainly reflects some of the key themes that run through the book, it doesn’t manage to capture the central focus – namely, election campaigns! From the excerpt above, the reader may rightly surmise that the book focuses on the interface between technology and politics in modern India, particular the tendency of technological fetishism (for example, centered on computers, as in the case of the passage that has been quoted) and the role and power that technocratic elites enjoy in political decision making. However, it may give the reader the faulty impression that the book is more historical in its orientation than it actually is. The primary focus of the book is to explore the changes that have taken place in India’s election campaigns over the last decade. The roots of these changes can certainly be traced to the 1980s and the section above is part of the book where I flesh out this contextual overview.

Nevertheless, I am quite glad that the Page 99 Test threw up this section. Writing this section of the book was notoriously difficult because of a lack of adequate archival material and because key interlocutors were not available to be interviewed. But in the end, this was also the part of my research that was the most analytically rewarding and enjoyable. At times, it felt like almost a detective story – piecing together the most disparate clues on how India’s political elites in the 1980s had started using computer technology and large-scale data gathering to rethink how electoral strategizing and intra-party politics could be managed. For readers interested in the longer story, the book awaits…

Learn more about The Backstage of Democracy at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Merten Reglitz's "Free Internet Access as a Human Right"

Merten Reglitz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Free Internet Access as a Human Right, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the book does two things. It first concludes and summarises the argument of chapter 4. This argument is that internet access should be recognised as a human right because having such access has become necessary for having sufficient or adequate opportunities to exercise our political human rights (e.g. free speech, free information, free assembly) today. Secondly, page 99 introduces a crucial objection to this argument, namely that we don’t need a new, stand-alone human right to internet access because such access is already protected by our existing human rights such as our right to free speech. Beyond page 99, the chapter goes on to discuss and to defuse this objection.

Page 99 gives you a good idea of what the book is like because it summarises one of its central arguments. Moreover, the consideration of an objection is central for building and defending philosophical arguments. So page 99 contains some of the essential elements of a philosophical work, which this book is. At the same time, page 99 is not representative of the book. This is because it doesn’t contain any examples of how the internet is used by people, governments, and companies. It also doesn’t contain any explanation of how these uses of the internet matter morally, and for our human rights. These examples and their normative analysis make up much of the book.

This combination of philosophical argumentation with normative analysis of examples of internet use is a crucial contribution that the book makes to the existing literature. Philosophers and other researchers have discussed individual aspects of the internet. They have investigated e.g. what the internet has done to people’s understanding of knowledge, how it has enabled more powerful ways of expressing ourselves, what new ways of misinformation it unfortunately also makes possible, or how it has transformed how we spend our time and interact with each other. What the book does with these considerations (and many other examples) is to make the case for a new universal entitlement that would guarantee a minimum internet connection for everyone and which, importantly, will require public institutions to ensure a certain quality of internet access for people. This should be such that the internet can be used as an empowering medium, rather than one that is used to maximise profits, monitor populations and oppress political opponents, or to misinform and manipulate. The book’s main conclusion is that public institutions ought to adopt a new human right to free internet access as a foundation of a vision of the internet that, as the UN hopes, will contribute to “the progress of mankind as a whole.”

Learn more about Free Internet Access as a Human Right at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Munson's "Ingenious"

Richard Munson is an author and clean-energy advocate. His books include Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food, Tesla: Inventor of the Modern, From Edison to Enron, Cardinals of Capitol Hill, and Cousteau: The Captain and His World.

Munson applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Ingenious describes Benjamin Franklin’s efforts after the French and Indian War to advance a union between England and the American colonies. It states:

As the war wound down, Franklin weighed in on the peace negotiations to suggest that England assume control over Canada rather than Guadeloupe, arguing that the British Empire needed to secure North America’s northern and western frontiers. He asserted that settlements in the Mississippi valley and Quebec would offer substantial benefits to the mother country, providing an immense outlet for British industry.

The Page 99 Test doesn’t work that well because by page 99 (of 197) Franklin is still loyal to the British king, even suggesting Americans would not “unite against their own nation [England], which protects and encourages them.” That page also does not address Franklin’s science, which this biography asserts is the throughline that integrated Benjamin’s diverse interests.

I argue that historians have highlighted certain of Franklin’s actions – particularly diplomacy – and ignored others – particularly science. One of the most cited biographies devotes only 30 of its 500 pages to Benjamin’s experiments and observations, and an encyclopedia maintains that “Franklin never thought science was as important as public service.”

I disagree. With all due respect to Franklin’s public service, we wouldn’t be discussing his diplomatic prowess were it not for his fame as a leading scientist, which opened doors for him in France, Britian, and the colonies.

Franklin gave us practical advances – including lightning rods, efficient stoves, and bifocals – as well as innovative research on electricity, heat, chemical bonds, weather patterns, and so much more.

Benjamin also used his science politically. Believing Americans would be recognized by European elites only if they could demonstrate technological and scientific strength, he created a scholarly association dubbed the American Philosophical Society, which was one of the first efforts to have representatives from all the then fiercely independent colonies work together.

Ingenious argues we don’t know Franklin as well as we believe nor as richly as he deserves. It concludes by suggesting Benjamin’s continued relevance:

"As a vocal set of modern-day activists reject science and dismiss fact, Benjamin (one of our nation’s founders) highlights the importance of verifiable analysis. As zealots impose their religious beliefs, he makes the case for tolerance. As censors ban books and limit debate, he defends printers and free speech."

Visit Richard Munson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Clare Mulley's "Agent Zo"

Clare Mulley is an award-winning public historian, author and broadcaster, primarily focused on female experience during the Second World War.

Her new book is Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter, the critically-acclaimed biography of Elżbieta Zawacka, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi German-occupied Poland. Previous titles include the award-winning The Woman Who Saved the Children, on Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children although not fond of individual youngsters; The Spy Who Loved, a biography of the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent in the Second World War and who was acclaimed as Churchill’s ‘favourite spy’, Krystyna Skarbek aka Christine Granville; and The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the story of Nazi Germany’s only two female test pilots, one of whom tried to save Hitler’s life while the other tried to kill him. Mulley’s books are widely translated, and have all been optioned for film or TV.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Agent Zo and reported the following:

From page 99:

Zo was in full self-preservation mode. Striding into an upstairs dining-room, when she saw no exit she took a napkin from a table, draped it over her arm, and headed back to the staircase. Before she could climb any further, someone pulled her roughly to one side. Gesturing her to be silent, Paco steered Zo into a backroom. It struck her that she had no idea whether he was playing both sides, or if the guards had simply come to the inn for a glass of beer and been lucky. Before she had gathered her thoughts, Paco shoved her out of a side door directly down onto the mountainside…

'Agent Zo', in fact Elżbieta Zawacka, was very much the courageous woman of action during the Second World War, so it seems fitting to stumble across her evading Nazi German arrest, on page 99 of the book, through a mixture of cool presence of mind and being thrown from an upstairs door! This was in the spring of 1943, when she had already served behind enemy lines for over three years, as an intelligence officer and courier for the Polish resistance ‘Home Army’. Having already had a particularly close escape, forcing her to leap from a fast-moving steam-train, Zo had now been appointed as the only female emissary of the commander of an Allied army, and sent with microfilm across almost 1,000 miles of occupied Europe, to Britain.

Despite this close shave, as well as almost drowning in the water tender of another train, and being shot at in the freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees, Zo completed her mission. That September she became the only woman to parachute from Britain to enemy-occupied Poland, where she took part in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi German-occupation: the Warsaw Uprising. The great irony of her dramatic true story is that she was a hair’s breadth from capture from the very first day of the war to the last, but she was only ever arrested by the Soviet-imposed communist regime in her own country, Poland, after the war. To say more would be to give too much away…!

Visit Clare Mulley's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

The Page 99 Test: The Women Who Flew For Hitler.

My Book, The Movie: Agent Zo.

--Marshal Zeringue

William Furley's "Myths, Muses and Mortals"

William Furley is emeritus professor of Greek at Heidelberg University and research fellow at the Institute of Classical Studies, London. His publications include Greek Hymns and three editions of plays by Menander: Epitrepontes, Perikeiromene, and Misoumenos.

Furley applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Myths, Muses and Mortals: The Way of Life in Ancient Greece, and reported the following:

Page ninety-nine of my book comes from a chapter on travel and exploration in ancient Greece. It illustrates the Greeks' spirit of enterprise and discovery by a work of fantasy, the True History, by the second-century (AD) satirical writer Lucian. He describes an adventurer's fantastic voyage into the unknown starting from the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and exploring space, the heavenly bodies and far-flung lands. Here is an excerpt:

Although Lucian emphasizes that nothing he will relate of his fantasy journey is true, he says that makes him more honest than many other `historians' in that respect: `In one respect I am telling the truth---when I admit I'm lying.' (4) Lucian's narrator tells how he made preparations for a journey starting at the Pillars of Herakles. This landmark, the Straits of Gibraltar, was, for the Greeks, already the end of the known world. Their ships plied the Mediterranean, even if they knew that Phoenicians had gone further, even, by then, circumnavigating the continent of Africa, as they claimed (see Herodotus 4.42). So when Lucian's narrator says that he set off from Gibraltar to discover the `end of the world', this project was equivalent to that of Columbus in 1492: it was a voyage into the unknown. Although invented, the spirit in which he undertook the adventure is typical of the real-life spirit of Greek exploration by sea.

Page ninety-nine of my book is, as it happens, a useful sample of the whole. It illustrates my method throughout which is to introduce the Greek world through illustrative passages of literature and documentary evidence, place them in their historical context, and interpret the events and sentiments they are transmitting. The passage also reflects the intention of my book which is to explore the fascination of the ancient Greek world in an adventurous spirit, although my account is firmly grounded in the real written and visual record left by the Greeks.

The chapter on travel/exploration is one of nine focusing on various aspects of the 'Greek experience', ranging from love and celebration to warfare and philosophical thought. Central is a long section on Daily Life which, very roughly, follows important moments in the ancient Greek's day, from shopping in the morning at the Agora, messaging each other with writing tablets, to dinner-time entertainment and night-time street crime. As sources for these forays into ancient mentality I use works of literature from Homer at the beginning to the late Greek romantic novels, from historical works to courtroom speeches, from private curse tablets to public inscriptions. Most of our evidence comes from ancient Athens, but my scope covers writers and individuals from all over Greece and spans nearly a millennium. The emphasis throughout is not on history, although the story hangs on an historical frame, but on the Greeks' own expression of their feelings and experiences as they navigated these aspects of life. The text is illustrated by over fifty images, a good many of them taken by myself over the years.

Visit William Furley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Melissa Zinkin's "Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason"

Melissa Zinkin is Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University (SUNY). She has published articles on Kant, philosophy of art, and feminist philosophy.

Zinkin applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason, and reported the following:

At the top of page 99 of Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason one finds the heading "Comprehension." The rest of the page discusses the passage where Kant defines "comprehension." For Kant, comprehension is the highest degree of cognition. He writes that "to comprehend (begreifen) something (is) to cognize (it) through reason...to the degree that it is sufficient for our purpose." He distinguishes comprehending something through reason from conceiving (concipiren) it by the faculty of the understanding. I note that in German "begreifen" means "to grasp," whereas "concipiren" means "to sketch." From the distinction between these two words-- "grasping" vs. "sketching," we already get a sense of Kant's contrast between how we know something through reason and how we know it through the understanding. The former is a thorough and deep engagement with an object, the latter is preliminary and superficial.

Someone opening my book to page 99 would land on a discussion that introduces a core theme; for Kant, reason is that special faculty by which we have deep cognition, that is, comprehension, of an object. A major aim of the book is to show that for Kant reason is not just the faculty by which we get things "right." As we see today, "getting it right" is an ability that can be outsourced to machines. Human reason is deeper than that. It is that faculty by which human beings learn for ourselves the organizing principles of objects and what makes them what they are. It is also that faculty by which I comprehend for myself why some action is the one that is right for me to perform. By deeply comprehending the "rightness" of objects and actions through reason we make our ideas about them integral to our way of thinking and develop the capacity for good judgment about them in the future.

Later in the chapter that contains page 99, I argue that for Kant the activity of comprehending something is the same activity that is involved in judging something to be beautiful; we think deeply about its central purpose. This is also a central thesis of my book; that our capacity to judge that something is beautiful is fundamental to our capacity to deeply comprehend objects and actions in general.

Learn more about Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Karen Bloom Gevirtz's "The Apothecary's Wife"

Karen Bloom Gevirtz spent nearly three decades as a professor of English at American universities while also specializing in gender studies and medical humanities.

Her new book, The Apothecary's Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How It Became a Commodity, is one of Kirkus Review's Best Nonfiction Books of 2024.

Gevirtz applied the "Page 99 Test" to The Apothecary's Wife and reported the following:

Page 99 is the end of a chapter, and reads, “and medication between 1650 and 1740. Had the Digbys lived a century later, Kenelm would have had to become an expert in chicken soup, not viper wine, if he wanted to take care of his beloved Venetia.”

The Page 99 Test works quite well for my book, despite the fact that page 99 has only 37 words.

Each chapter centers on two remarkable figures, and on page 99 the browser encounters that device in the form of Kenelm and Venetia Digby. The passage includes a somewhat repulsive medication from the period (viper wine) and what it was used for (helping an ailing person), titillating information that appears throughout. Browsers also encounter the book’s approachable, occasionally wry or humorous voice, especially in the chicken soup line.

Unfortunately, while three central elements do appear on page 99 – that medication is important to the book, that medication changed over time, and that the period of change is 1650-1740 – each element is mentioned so briefly that a browser probably won’t get a sense of what the book is about. Reading page 98 or 100 would reveal properly that The Apothecary’s Wife is about the transition from domestic medicine made and administered at home by women to commercial medication made and sold in shops by men. It explains how the Scientific Revolution provided an opportunity for professionals to take over medication, and how they converted it from household goods like peach preserves and soap into something exchanged for money, that is, how the foundations of Big Pharma and today’s for-profit medication system were laid. Why did people stop getting medication for free, at home, from a trusted member of the family who made it from known ingredients combined in a time-tested recipe and start paying a stranger medication for medication made in secret from mystery ingredients? It wasn’t that the stranger’s medication was better, because it wasn’t, but a reader will not get that from page 99, alas.

Visit Karen Bloom Gevirtz's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacob Flaws's "Spaces of Treblinka"

Jacob Flaws is an assistant professor of history at Kean University. He teaches a broad range of classes on modern European history, the Holocaust, and comparative genocide. He is also a nonresident Research Fellow at the National World War II Museum (New Orleans, LA) for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Flaws applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp, and reported the following:

From page 99:

(local residents)…became relatively passive witnesses to what was occurring – only brought into the fold as random interactions dictated. Consequently, how someone responded when a Jewish escapee from Treblinka knocked on their door in the middle of the night truly varied on a case-by-case basis, creating a human space around the camp that was defined by uncertainty. Escapees could be shot at by a Pole in one house while the person next door might provide them food and shelter.

Historians continue to be frustrated by the difficulty in making blanket statements explaining why there was such a variance in Polish-Jewish interactions during the Holocaust…. Nonetheless, when it comes to explaining Polish behavior, it is obvious that each individual case merits its own evaluation and judgment. As Warsaw Ghetto Uprising planner Yitzhak Zuckerman astutely put it, “You can’t generalize about the Poles.” Thus, aside from documenting the widely varying Polish responses to escaping Jews, I am most interested here in exploring how the concept of space also played into the equation. In doing so, I acknowledge that during the war, Poland was actively being colonized by the Germans. Subsequently, Poles lost jurisdiction over many spaces, even their most intimate ones – their homes – a spatial domain that geographer Yi-Fu Tuan argues is universally recognized as offering basic security from the outside world. As spatial theorist Tim Cresswell explains further, home is “an intimate place…where a person can withdraw from…the world outside and have some degree of control over what happens within a limited space.” Consequently, as the Germans imposed unlimited jurisdiction over Polish spaces, they stole this control, this simple sovereignty to govern one’s everyday life, from Poles.

The Page 99 Test “worked” remarkably well in the case of my new book, Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp. The page is part of the introduction to Chapter 4: An Interactional Space, a chapter in which I was particularly struck by how each escapee created random vectors of interaction through split-second decisions often made on the run. The natural environment played a major part in this, especially in terms of dictating which spaces offered concealment or which were simply impassable. But it was the happenstance human encounters that often carried the weightiest consequences, usually for both parties involved.

Hence, as you can see on the text from page 99, I am seeking to add nuance to explaining why some Poles helped Jews, others were indifferent, and some even harmed them. Importantly, what’s missing from the page itself, but is included elsewhere in the chapter, is the disclaimer that I am not apologizing for Poles who harmed Jews or seeking to absolve those who are rightfully guilty of impeding Jewish survival. Instead, as the page 99 text does show, I’m arguing each case needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is especially powerful to remember when we consider that the clean categorization (victim, bystander, perpetrator) of individuals fails in the majority of cases, if for no other reason than these categories are fluid, and many individuals may span the range of all three (or more) within a short time frame.

More broadly, page 99 reflects the deeper perspective the entire book is trying to bring into the conversation – human spaces are very nuanced and are indeed “defined by uncertainty.” The goal of the book is to put German, Jewish, and Polish voices into conversation with one another to help recreate the contemporary spatial reality that comprised Treblinka and its surroundings when it existed from 1942-1943. That reality was multi-perspectival, nuanced, and uniquely individual, but there were also fairly consistent patterns associated with witnessing the death camp as well. If just glancing to page 99, you get a sense of this, but you almost certainly need the rest of the book to help envision the true scope of what Treblinka actually was.

Visit Jacob Flaws's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Myles Ethan Lascity's "The Abercrombie Age"

Myles Ethan Lascity is assistant professor and director of the fashion media program at Southern Methodist University.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Abercrombie Age: Millennial Aspiration and the Promise of Consumer Culture, and reported the following:

In The Abercrombie Age, page 99 recaps some of the critiques of teen popular culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. More specifically, the page frames the film Josie and the Pussycats as a satirical critique of teen brand and consumer culture. It also introduces other criticisms from the era, including Naomi Klein’s No Logo, Alisa Quart’s Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teens and the Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool.

Page 99 is a good — if not quite perfect — representation of the book.

The Abercrombie Age examines and critiques the messages embedded within teen popular culture texts from 1995 through 2008, or roughly the release of Clueless through the global financial crisis, the ending of MTV’s TRL and the release of Twilight. While many of the criticisms leveled at teen culture of the time amounted to a belief that it was vapid and too obsessed with popularity, The Abercrombie Age argues that even if the popular culture was vapid and superficial, its focus on consumer culture as an avenue to success and fulfillment left a lasting impression on the eldest millennials, who were teens of the time.

While No Logo, Branded and The Merchants of Cool helped inform my thinking on the subject, The Abercrombie Age specifically outlines the promotion of privileged frivolity: in which good-looking, well-off and largely white teens were shown having few concerns beyond socialization and interpersonal relationships and rarely faced repercussions for their actions. Coupling this with messages that promoted consumerism as a means to popularity and happiness, pop culture of the time was unyieldingly optimistic and implied that nothing was too serious, and everything would eventually work out. And, even if some teens were not living the dream at the time, movies and TV shows suggested they could certainly secure it in the future through the consumption of college and employment in desirable creative fields.

Although the ethos of privileged frivolity fell out of fashion post-2008 and a more inclusive, accepting teen life made its way to screens, as millennials enter midlife, we are faced with the increasing awareness that life looks little like what we were promised — and it probably never will.

Visit Myles Ethan Lascity's website.

--Marshal Zeringue