Keith Richotte Jr.'s "The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told"

Keith Richotte Jr. is the Director of the Indigenous Peoples and Policy Program, Professor of Law at the James E. Rogers College of Law at the University of Arizona, and Chief Justice of the Spirit Lake Appellate Court; and he never thought he would ever have this many jobs at once.

Richotte applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Constitution, and reported the following:

From page 99:

As we have seen, the Supreme Court has been, shall we say, less than rigorous in identifying a specific constitutional source of federal authority over Native America. To that end, on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has simply asserted that the U.S. Constitution as a whole is the source of federal authority with little if any reference to specific provisions within the document. … It might be tempting to dismiss McLean’s opinion as an outlier, especially as it was not really in keeping with how we understand the law either then or now. But it is nonetheless helpful because it is evidence of a pattern: on a number of occasions the Supreme Court has asserted that the authority being claimed over Native America is authorized under the U.S. Constitution as a self-evident truism.

If I happened to overhear the Page 99 Test telling a friend about my book using its methodology, I would not be compelled to jump in and correct the Test. Rather, I would be amused at how quickly and simply the Test both cuts to the bone of the argument and hints at the relaxed, familiar, and even humorous way the book makes that argument.

What authority does the federal government hold over Native America? More importantly, how does it justify the authority that it claims? Does this justification comport with its claims over its citizenry more generally? What consequences do the answers to these questions hold for Native America?

These questions fuel The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told. The Page 99 Test reveals much of the heart of the book: the answers to these questions provided by the Supreme Court are not particularly satisfactory. By examining the justifications for federal authority through an Indigenous perspective, it becomes clear that the Supreme Court is trying to tell what amounts to a trickster story – but it is the worst one ever told.

Why is it the worst trickster story ever told and what can we do about it?

Please read the book to find out.

Learn more about The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brittany Friedman's "Carceral Apartheid"

Brittany Friedman is recognized as an innovative thinker on how people and institutions hide harmful truths. Her current work examines this in the realm of social control, and the underside of government such as prisons, courts, and treasuries. Friedman is considered a pathbreaking scholar producing big ideas that blow the whistle on bad behavior within society, and author of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to Carceral Apartheid and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons takes us on the journey of the second Great Migration, where generations of Black families have fled white supremacist violence in the U.S. South, hoping to find refuge in California. Yet, upon arrival they continued to experience more racism, which in some cases radicalized the liberatory politics of West Coast Black communities. I write on page 99:

Black families who had fled the South were left feeling disillusioned. Their hopes and dreams for a better life elsewhere were revealed to be simply unattainable due to the same racialized violence they had endured for generations.

Particularly for the younger cohort, joining Black revolutionary struggles in California became a way to fight back against new versions of the same carceral apartheid that their families fled in the Southern states. During the time that I first met Anthony, I also began to connect with several members of Black political organizations who joined in the 1960s.

Through this network I met Avery, a high-ranking leader in the original Black Panther Party who explained to me in an interview this sentiment in the context of Oakland, California:

Oakland is probably very much the ideal place because Oakland had been an all White city up until the forties, 1940s, when, during the second Great Migration, Blacks came to Oakland, as they did to Chicago, whatever, from the south…So, Oakland went from being a white city to an almost half Black City, in like one generation. In the south, where you had the main part of the movement; where the majority of Black people had been living, the Whites were so violent and vicious…Now, why is that important?

Because, who joins the Black Panther Party are the people who are living in the North because they are already disconnected from the Klan, so they don’t have that fear; they don’t have that fear of the Klan. But, now they have a consciousness; who is going to let somebody…

Surprisingly, page 99 captures deeply a key takeaway from my book that explains why the Black Freedom Movement holds a significant place in California history. This page also showcases the power of life history interviews and how Carceral Apartheid weaves lived experiences with clear theorizing throughout the book’s storytelling, a writing style often found in creative non-fiction.

Overall, the test works for my book in so much that page 99 displays a key takeaway from Carceral Apartheid. The generation of the 1960s and 1970s that fought for liberation and organized major social movement groups against carceral apartheid were a unique generation in terms of many being the children of Black people fleeing the Ku Klux Klan dominated South, with the promise of a new life. When they instead encountered a similar pattern of alliances between emerging white supremacist groups and the police in California, both in society and within prisons, they fought back every step of the way.

So even though the Page 99 Test only captures a portion of my book’s main argument, it does reveal several of my book’s strengths. Notably, my use of original interviews with people who catalyzed organized resistance to the system of oppression that I term “carceral apartheid,” the system I trace as a violent through-line of colonial and postcolonial governance designed to decimate, destroy, and divide political opposition.

Visit Brittany Friedman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew C. Halteman's "Hungry Beautiful Animals"

Matthew C. Halteman is professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics in the UK. He is the author of Compassionate Eating as Care of Creation and co-editor of Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments about the Ethics of Eating.

His new book, Hungry Beautiful Animals: The Joyful Case for Going Vegan, is a heartfelt, humane, and humorous exploration of how going vegan can bring abundance into our lives.

Halteman applied the “Page 99 Test” to Hungry Beautiful Animals and reported the following:

Page 99:

[Or parrying writer’s block] with a furious elliptical run to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin.’” Or bracing for a workday that might otherwise elicit one-finger salutes to all comers by lingering in a hug from a loved one. Ah, the calming effects of oxytocin!

Managing our inner ecologies can be mighty difficult too. Like when your heart blissfully ignores both your gut and your head as a toxic relationship sends you careening toward implosion. Or when a month of poorly managed work travel transports you predictably from Lonely Valley throughout Booze Gulch onto the floor of the dingiest room at the Motel Dicey Choices. Or when your gut wants a burger, your heart wants to nuzzle a cow, and your head bobbles about between defending old habits and exploring new ones as your friends look on befuddled.

To fully express our capabilities for well-being—to “flourish,” as Aristotle would say—we need relative harmony across the provinces of our territory. When we are unwell, chances are that two or more of the provinces are at war. If we want to bring peace among them, it pays to know each of them intimately—their points of strength, their weaknesses, their insecurities, which ones naturally collaborate well and which ones are temperamentally at odds. Perhaps most importantly, we must know who to approach first to start building the requisite alliances.

Here’s where the genius of Bryant’s advice to “start with the visceral” really comes home. It’s hard to imagine the beauty of a vegan world while your stomach churns at the thought of endless turnip porridge and your heart sinks into dread of the social death sentence sure to follow. Disgust and anxiety are imagination killers. If you want to open a window from our inner ecology into the beauty of a vegan world, go first and with gusto for [the gut, preferably with a superabundance of delicious food and comforting company.]

Page 99 of Hungry Beautiful Animals is as serendipitous a harbinger of what to expect from the book as I imagine any single page could be.

The first five lines offer an accurate sampling of authorial voice: we read a quippy and self-deprecating yet authoritative Gen-Xer wielding the edginess of a rude gesture and the camp of a Journey anthem to balance the glow of a sudden flood of love.

The book’s essence peers out from the first full paragraph: an opportunity to envision and enact transformational changes of our eating habits in ways that embrace and celebrate the complexity of human desire in its oft-conflicted physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and moral aspects. We see that we don’t need to judge ourselves for struggling to unify our “inner ecology”—that we can fail, learn from our foibles, even laugh about them, and then aspire to go again (always imperfectly) in the direction of the beautiful vegan world that has captured our imagination.

A window into the book’s method opens in the second paragraph: to draw on philosophical traditions, East and West, ancient and contemporary, to help us align our desires with our best interests. Achieving the flourishing lives and the gorgeous world we all desire is a matter of knowing ourselves intimately enough to meet all the inner parts of ourselves where they are and invite them into joy: to make peace outside, we must first make peace inside.

The final paragraph anchors page 99 like Bryant Terry’s inspiration to “start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, and end at the political” anchors Hungry Beautiful Animals. To get our inner families into accord, we must put feelings before facts and assure the gut and the heart that delicious food and abiding fellowship are possible in a vegan world. Then and only then can we pivot with joy to the headwork of figuring out our unique contributions to this world-transforming work and the politics of being the change we wish to see.

As a bonus, this deference to Bryant Terry’s work at the foot of the page previews the grounding energy of Black vegan work throughout the book, which draws inspiration from Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, A. Breeze Harper’s Sistah Vegan, Aph Ko and Syl Ko’s Aphro-ism, and Christopher Carter’s The Spirit of Soul Food in those pivotal moments where everything is at stake.

Visit Matthew C. Halteman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Surekha Davies's "Humans: A Monstrous History"

Surekha Davies spent her childhood watching Star Trek and planning to become an astronaut. By the end of her freshman year there was no warp drive, never mind comfy starships. She became a historian of science instead, specializing in the histories of exploration, cartography, cross-cultural encounters, and monsters in the era from Columbus to Captain Cook.

Davies has a BA and an M.Phil. in history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of London. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters.

After working as a curator and as a history professor, Davies became a full-time author and speaker.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Humans: A Monstrous History, and reported the following:

Page 99 opens with Trevor Noah, the South African comedian. The title of his autobiography, Born a Crime, encapsulates an act of administrative erasure. During the apartheid era, mixed-race relationships were illegal in South Africa, and Noah, the child of such a relationship, spent his early childhood hidden at home. The legal regime of apartheid invented monsters of invisibility: people defined in law as nonpersons, a process that made them legally excludable from society. Defining people as illegal effectively defines them as monsters: as something beyond regular categories, a threat to be suppressed. Such laws show how ideas about race and nation can operate in the same way. They fix the idea of innate differences into a system of hierarchy that justifies an unequal distribution of rights and protections.

The page then outlines a pervasive myth: that before the twentieth century, people in different countries and continents were totally separate and distinct. Myths about medieval European nations (before the sixteenth century, before European colonialism across oceans) being white, Christian, and ethnically one-dimensional fuel white supremacist conspiracy theories today. At times, European Christians in the Middle Ages (between around the seventh and the fourteenth centuries) defined Jews, Muslims, and people from different parts of Europe as monstrous. Such monstrifying stories lie at the roots of today’s debates about nationhood and citizenship.

The page’s closing alludes to less demonizing ways of defining “nation”: as community relationships, not necessarily blood relationships. Native American nations define tribal belonging in ways that differ from nation to nation. Today’s notion of citizenship as a legal category that can be fulfilled in various ways contains something of that flexible way of understanding belonging. But as we reach the end of page 99 and turn over, we’re reminded that this is not how citizenship is typically experienced in practice.

Humans: A Monstrous History ranges from antiquity to the present and roams around the world. Page 99 offers a glimpse of this: apartheid-era South Africa, eleventh-century Europe, contemporary North America. It reveals the book’s core argument: that monster-making is a process of storytelling. People often invent monsters to disappear people who show that seemingly separate categories sit on a continuum.

But page 99 doesn’t reflect the book’s breadth: science, history, politics, pop culture. And it doesn’t reflect the overall feel of the book. The page suggests that the book makes grim reading, but other pages contain comedy and wonder. Humans ranges from light-hearted material like Monsters, Inc. to harrowing stories like that of Charles Byrne, the “Irish giant” whose skeleton was displayed after his death against his wishes, to manifesto-speak about Big Tech. Some sections are utopian, like discussions of the Muppets. Some explore historical events and people; others analyze novels and movies. The test doesn’t capture the full experience of the book although it reveals a key takeaway.

The book as a whole shows how people define humans, monsters, norms, and other beings in relation to one another. Humans is structured thematically in chapters that move from earth to outer space. People invent monsters in order to define three boundaries. One lies between the human and “other stuff” – animals, gods, machines, Martians. Another is the boundary between social groups: this is how societies define and police categories of race, nation, sex, and gender. The third is the boundary of “normal”: by defining monsters, people define norms. And in order to claim that there are discrete categories, people define anyone that doesn’t fit them as an exception, a threat to be suppressed or punished, or as a monster that breaks categories. To build a better future, we might remember instead that each one of us is unique: if we are each monstrous in the sense of being wondrous, then no one is a monster.

Page 99 appears as part of a longer excerpt and author interview in The Ink.

Visit Surekha Davies's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Joshua K. Leon's "World Cities in History"

Joshua K. Leon is a writer, and Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona University. He was awarded the 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.

His latest book, World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.”

Leon applied the “Page 99 Test” to World Cities in History and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book, World Cities in History, can tell us a lot about the savage inequalities of a point in time: the early Roman Empire and the cities that linked it together. It does not do what the rest of the book does, which is broadly explain how power worked in historic urban networks, so-called golden ages when cities expanded in scope, size, and reach.

But the page is representative of the book. We learn that this was a high period for urbanization. The urban network linking the Roman Empire consisted of 1,800 cities housing perhaps ten million people. Still, they were a minority, dominating the imperial hinterlands that fed them with, for example, grain from Egypt. We learn that local democracy had deteriorated, with a few rich people controlling urban planning through direct financing (in the form of liturgies) rather than deliberation and taxes.

On this page, a new section starts that begins discussing how the Roman Empire reached this point through force, diplomacy and myth. Augustus reconstructed the state on the national narrative written by the poet Virgil. None of it was really true, but it spoke to Augustus's revolution in urban life that he framed as a restoration to times past, down to the city's mythological founding by Trojan refugees.

In the myth, women pay dearly for the construction of their new city-state. They are abducted from rival tribes and married off in order to populate the city—because in ancient times, population was power. They were pawns in Rome’s expansion, dealt like currency in city mergers that enlarged the state. Constant wars of course reflected the recent past of the Late Republic, until the newfound stability of Augustan rule.

That was the myth. The bottom of page 99 hints at the reality of Augustus the city builder. He does not come off well. He sought to Make Rome Great Again with very real legal codes intended to restore the supposed female chastity and piety from those simpler agrarian times. Clearly, he was legislating based on myth, rather than reality, yet the human consequences of Augustus's crusading to reshape the city would have been palpable. For the vital details, you'll have to turn to page 100.

Visit Joshua K. Leon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hiroshi Motomura's "Borders and Belonging"

Hiroshi Motomura is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Immigration Outside the Law (2014), Americans in Waiting (2006), many influential articles on immigration and citizenship, and he is a co-author of the law school casebook, Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy. He has testified in Congress and served on the ABA Commission on Immigration. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International Migration Review and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2018.

Motomura applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Borders and Belonging is part of Chapter Six, which addresses a key question in immigration debates: what about people without lawful status? The focus is the United States, but the discussion offers lessons for analogous debates worldwide. Chapter 6 as a whole explains why the best approach is legalization – that is, offering lawful status based on some conditions. Page 99 digs into a specific problem with legalization – that one-time legalization will do nothing to prevent the emergence of a new population of people without lawful status. Page 99 explains that one way to anticipate and address this problem is to have some sort of periodic legalization, but then I turn to the limits of this approach.

A reader who looks at page 99 will get a good glimpse of the book, but just a glimpse. Let me first explain what makes the glimpse a good one. Page 99 shows that the book is about immigration policy, and that it grapples with one of the topic’s most contentious issues, legalization (or amnesty). Page 99 also shows that the book takes on some of the conventional wisdoms shared by legalization’s proponents. In particular, page 99 expresses skepticism about the potential of legalization as a durable solution. So page 99 is like many pages in all chapters in two ways. First, page 99 delves deeper than the usual arguments. Second, it emphasizes how responsible approaches to immigration require broadening the time horizon to include both a long-term view and mustering the patience to put farsightedness into practice.

Why, then, would readers get only a limited view of Borders and Belonging by reading page 99? I wrote the book because I’ve learned, over several decades in this field, that almost all writing and thinking about immigration policy is too narrow. People with views or research on immigration often don’t see refugees as their topic. Lawyers don’t consider the work of international development economists. Immigrants’ rights activists may dismiss the concerns of Americans who feel displaced by immigration and immigrants. Borders and Belonging adopts a much broader perspective that includes issues that are rarely addressed together and yet are interwoven in reality.

So chapter 6 is about people without lawful status, but chapter 1 asks a very different question: “why national borders, and why not?” Chapter 9 examines a topic often raised but less often examined: “what does it mean to address migration’s root causes”? Chapter 10 discusses the relevance of history to the making of immigration policy today. In short, page 99 may give the impression that the book is about people without lawful status, when in fact the book weaves that topic into a complex set of interlocking questions. The answers try to be faithful to the book’s subtitle. And so the book is: Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy.

Learn more about Borders and Belonging at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce Robbins's "Atrocity: A Literary History"

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (2022).

Robbins applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Atrocity: A Literary History, and reported the following:

Well gosh! In my case the Ford Madox Ford test seems to have worked pretty well. Page 99 of Atrocity: A Literary History offers evidence from the nineteenth century to back up two key arguments of the book, both of them liable to be controversial: 1) that while racism or ethnocentrism certainly made it easier in the past for people to commit atrocities against Others or foreigners, there are plenty of atrocities in which racism was not a cause at all, indeed had nothing to do with the capacity to slaughter noncombatants, and 2) that while we think of white European populations in modern times as full of enthusiasm for atrocities committed by their armies against people of color, there have always been some (not necessarily anti-imperialist) who were horrified both by the violence and by the lies told to justify it. So-- this goes to the argument of the book as a whole--I contend that humanity does have a significant moral history, a progressive history, and this in spite of the terrible, terrible atrocities committed in modern times, atrocities (think of both the Holocaust and the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Gaza since October 2023) that have made modern times seem the most violent times of all.

Learn more about Atrocity: A Literary History at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Abigail Ocobock's "Marriage Material"

Abigail Ocobock is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Marriage Material: How an Enduring Institution Is Changing Same-Sex Relationships, and reported the following:

Page 99 launches browsers into the middle of a chapter about a group of LGBTQ+ people I call “Marriage Assumers.” The previous two chapters examine two other groups - “Marriage Embracers” and “Marriage Rejecters.” Taken together, these chapters explore variations in the marital orientations of different kinds of LGBTQ+ people.

Page 99 conveniently offers readers a brief summary of what they have already learnt about Marriage Assumers thus far in the chapter. Asking them to “pause and imagine the average Marriage Assumer for a minute,” it directs readers to imagine the following kind of LGBTQ+ person:

She came out and started dating same-sex partners after legal marriage was already possible. She always assumed that she would get legally married one day. Knowing that her relationships have marriage potential matters to her, and she has vetted her partners for marriage interest and commitment early on, making it a deal-breaker. She does not know exactly why marriage is so important to her. Instead, she feels it is “just what you do” when you love someone and are committed to them. She also wants children, and she feels strongly (but rather abstractly) that marriage is important for having them. She has been lucky enough to find a partner who feels the same way.

Having reiterated central features of a “Marriage Assumer,” page 99 then guides readers to focus on the topic of a new section on “Marital Readiness” by asking: “But how does she know when it is the right time to get married?”

By the end of the page, I have set the scene for answering that question, but have not yet delved into the data that does so. I explain that although Marriage Assumers needed to know that marriage was “on the table” from the beginning, it was usually only the front end of their relationships that progressed very quickly toward marriage, then their relationships slowed down (something I later refer to as “locking it down, then slowing it down” – p.101). Marriage Assumers moved quickly from meeting to dating and moving in together, in an effort to ensure a commitment that could put them on the track toward marriage, but then wanted to take their time to achieve particular relationship and life attributes deemed necessary for marital readiness. Marriage was regarded as the crowning achievement of their relationships; it was something they were consciously working toward, but would not rush into.

Browsers would get only a partial idea of the whole work from page 99. They would gain a general sense that it examines how LGBTQ+ people think about and do marriage. Yet relationship trajectories and “marital readiness” represent just one small part of that larger story.

Because page 99 conveniently summarizes how “Marriage Assumers” think about marriage, readers would accurately glean the way marriage is taken for granted by LGBTQ+ people who formed serious relationships after same-sex marriage was already legal, and the extent to which marriage defines their relationships. And if one had to pick a group to narrow in on, Marriage Assumers perhaps make most sense. Now marriage is legal nationwide, all LGBTQ+ people start their relationships with the option to legally marry.

But it is only by comparing across groups that readers gain important insights about the transformative impact of legal marriage on LGBTQ+ lives. Browsers might be left with an impression that same-sex relationships today are fairly indistinguishable from heterosexual ones. But they may not realize that this represents a significant transformation in same-sex relationships. And they will not understand what has been gained and lost with that change. Notably, at the very top of page 99 a run-on sentence from the previous page emphasizes “the central role that access to legal marriage plays in shifting ideas about marriage and parenting across generations.” The rest of page 99 quickly moves on to a new sub-section, but I hope a savvy reader might be alerted to ponder social change.

What I would want readers to know, that might not be possible from page 99 alone, is that Marriage Material is not just about same-sex marriage. I use the case of same-sex marriage to advance understanding of the enduring and changing meaning of marriage as an institution. I challenge the prevailing narrative in family sociology that marriage is a fundamentally weakened institution, showing how it continues to shape individual choices and behaviors in profound ways. I illustrate how marriage operates, shedding light on a variety of institutional mechanisms that work independently and in tandem for different people. Overall, I contend that marriage has had a transformative power on same-sex relationships—one that is much stronger than the power of LGBTQ+ individuals to change the meaning and practice of marriage.

Learn more about Marriage Material at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Mann's "You Are My Sunshine"

Robert Mann is the author of ten books on U.S. and Louisiana political history. He was a senior aide to US senators Russell Long and John Breaux and Louisiana governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. A professor emeritus of mass communication at Louisiana State University, Mann held the Manship Endowed Chair in Journalism at the Manship School of Mass Communication at LSU for 18 years.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song, and reported the following:

Page 99 of You Are My Sunshine: Jimmie Davis and the Biography of a Song does not give the reader much insight into the history of the iconic song in my book’s subtitle. This page is devoted to Davis’s transformation from country singer to gospel music entertainer in the early 1950s, four years after the conclusion of his first term as Louisiana governor.

[Davis] surely noticed that other country artists were releasing more gospel songs. Popular acts like the Bailes Brothers and Molly O’Day had made gospel records since the late 1940s. Davis’s label, Decca, had inaugurated a “Faith Series” in March 1950 featuring gospel recordings by its top stars, including the Andrews Sisters, Ernest Tubb, and Red Foley. Foley’s 1950 recording of the gospel standard “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” was a top-ten country hit in July 1950. In February 1951, Eddy Arnold’s “May The Good Lord Bless and Keep You” for RCA Victor reached number five on the country chart. And that summer, Foley released another gospel single, Thomas A. Dorsey’s “Peace In The Valley.” It became the first million-selling gospel record. It’s unclear how much these hits influenced Davis, but by 1951, he had gone all in. He would record almost nothing but gospel music for the next two decades. It was a brilliant decision that kept his career alive. Within a few years, as rock and roll exploded in popularity, most of the top country stars of the 1940s and early 1950s saw their careers decline. But, because he had already migrated into a new genre, Davis’s career survived and thrived.

Not only were his audiences ready for this new, dignified, upright Jimmie Davis, but his voice was well-suited for gospel. On the first recordings with the Anita Kerr Singers, Davis’s voice was pure and smooth, with a revitalized, heartfelt quality. Perhaps it was the new sparer instrumentation. Or maybe it was the support of masterful backup singers. Whatever the case, it was a fresh and appealing sound.

In re-launching his career as a singer of sacred songs, Davis was also a trailblazer. There were few major solo artists in Southern gospel. When Davis entered the field, singing groups— mostly quartets—dominated the genre. They roamed the South, performing in churches and other venues. Among the most prominent were The Chuck Wagon Gang, The Speer Family, The Blackwoods, The Statesmen, and The Sunshine Boys Quartet. For Davis, the new emphasis on gospel music boosted his waning career. The decision came with a ready audience that had followed him for years and loved gospel music as much or more than they loved country music. Those already toiling in the southern gospel field regarded his advent not as threatening competition but as an enormous compliment. “The gospel music industry profited during the 1950s from a genuine celebrity in its midst,” James R. Goff Jr. wrote of Davis in Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel.

When I began working on this book, I set out to explore the background of Louisiana’s state song, a simple lullaby that I thought Jimmie Davis wrote. At the time, I had no idea I would chronicle four decades of Louisiana political history and as many years of country music history, all through the lens of this iconic song.

Here's the book’s bottom line: Davis didn’t write “Sunshine,” but the song was the foundation of his remarkable political career as well as vital to the growth and respectability of hillbilly music, what we now know as country music. “Sunshine” and other seminal hillbilly songs helped give the nascent musical genre respectability by crossing over into popular music when stars like Bing Crosby and other non-hillbilly artists recorded them in the early and mid-1940s. It was one of the main reasons for Davis's induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1972.

“Sunshine” was also vital to Davis’s political success in the 1940s and 1960s. It helped him become Louisiana’s governor twice. That’s because “Sunshine” and other hit songs like it allowed him to overcome and obscure the fact that he had made a series of bawdy Blues records in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Those songs -- with names like “Bed Bug Blues,” “High Behind Blues,” “Tom Cat and Pussy Blues,” and “She’s a Hum Dum Dinger from Dingersville” -- threatened to derail his embryonic political career. But the wholesomeness of his popular, trademark song overwhelmed all that and blunted his opponents’ attacks.

Although he didn’t write “Sunshine,” it’s impossible to appreciate the song’s cultural and political significance unless you understand Davis, his personality, artistry, and long and colorful political career.

Visit Robert Mann's website.

The Page 99 Test: Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU.

--Marshal Zeringue

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's "Making the Human"

Corinne Mitsuye Sugino is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Center for Ethnic Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of Asian American studies, rhetorical theory, cultural studies, and media studies.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans is located in the early pages of chapter four, which focuses on public discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its relationship to anti-Asian racism. Global catastrophes like pandemics often create a widespread sense of public panic and uncertainty. They shake social senses of security and normalcy, and as a result, not only do scientists search for solutions but a number of public narratives emerge to make sense of them as well. During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the U.S. witnessed the overtly racist narrative that Asian and Asian American communities were to blame for spreading the virus, as well as public criticism that the U.S. was handling the pandemic like a “Third World country” or “failed state.” While criticism of the U.S. pandemic response is certainly warranted, this particular comparison nevertheless illustrated that the pandemic had scandalized a widespread public assumption: that “First World” nations like the U.S. are immune to these devastating disease and viral outbreaks, often imagined to be confined to faraway Asian and African countries. Page 99 discusses how these narratives function, illustrating how many public discourses around COVID-19 attempted to make sense of its social and geopolitical significance in ways that were highly racialized. Page 99 situates these narratives in larger histories and scholarship on pandemic narratives. It also argues that as public narratives attempted to make sense of COVID-19 as an imperceptible virus that moves seamlessly through human carriers, they targeted Asian and Asian American people (and their environments, such as the commentary on wet markets) as embodiments of the virus itself. As the page argues, this narrative “manages anxieties about a ‘leaking’ Third World or threatened U.S. geopolitical dominance. By associating the virus with Asian/Americans, U.S. public discourses can replace an unlocatable and unstable anxiety with a definitive object- the virus can be given a cause, blame can be assigned, and Asian/Americans can stand in as symbolic embodiments of COVID-19 itself.” (99)

Although not a perfect representation of the book in its entirety, page 99 does touch on a key idea that brings it together: racial allegory. Making the Human theorizes racial allegory as the way that media, institutional, and cultural discourses narratively mobilize Asian American difference to naturalize a limited understanding of what it means to be human. The book addresses a range of contexts and sources across law, media, and popular culture, so a reader opening the book to page 99 wouldn’t know that the book also considers narratives of “justice” and “meritocracy” in the recent SCOTUS battle over affirmative action in chapter three, or that chapter two talks about gendered representations of Asian American families and mothering in popular film. Nevertheless, they would see the larger concept of racial allegory at play, namely in the discussion of how pandemic narratives are as much about power as they are about health. Making the Human is interested in how Asian Americans appear as key narrative figures in the stories we tell about social phenomena, including COVID-19: what are Asian Americans doing in these stories, and what do they represent? What value judgements do these stories use Asian Americans to imply, and what hierarchies do they implicitly normalize as a result? In the case of COVID-19, Asian Americans are framed as disease-ridden carriers, as conspiratorial agents of the Chinese nation state, as the specter of a supposedly backwards “Third World,” as indicators of U.S. national decline, and more. All of these stories are doing work: to shore up U.S. exceptionalism, to stoke fears of a geopolitically powerful Chinese nation-state, to resecure the boundaries of the (white) national body, and so forth. Other chapters focus on different narratives: for example, how the SCOTUS battle over affirmative action cast Asian Americans as studious, innocent, and victimized citizens, which then did the work of reframing age-old anti- Black backlash to affirmative action in the supposedly “anti-racist” language of defending Asian Americans. So, like the other chapters, this chapter illustrates that it is not only important to name a narrative as a racist stereotype, but also to understand what symbolic and material work that narrative is doing to normalize (or challenge) larger hierarchies.”

Visit Corinne Mitsuye Sugino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue