Margaret Morganroth Gullette's "American Eldercide"

Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and anti-ageism pioneer whose prize-winning work is foundational in critical age studies. She is the author of several books, including Agewise, Aged by Culture, and Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Atlantic, Nation, and the Boston Globe. She is a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis, and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Gullette applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, American Eldercide: How It Happened, How to Prevent It, and reported the following:

American Eldercide concerns a dreadful failure of social justice in the COVID Era. It starts as an investigation of how the Trump administration, Congress, and the states abandoned the 1,400,000 residents of nursing facilities early in the Era. People who happened to be living in those government-supervised facilities were twenty-six times more likely to die than the rest of us.

Many were exposed to the virus when they could have been protected. Discarded as if they were expendable. Dependent on authorities who seemed distant or witless. Unable to get away to greater safety. Often dying alone. Yet saving them would have been doable: There were only 1.4 million of them. And they were resilient, not at all ready to die. The catastrophe was due not to the residents’ “biology” but to the well-known, ongoing failures of the public-health system.

Books about COVID ignore or slight these indigent people, mostly women, most on Medicaid, often disabled. This book, fueled by righteous anger, has to explain how they came to be ignored and, by now, forgotten. Americans were trained to accept a terrifying, widespread new form of ageist ableism, that youth would survive, but another falsely homogeneous category called “The Old” would die. Neither stereotype was empirically true, but a panicky, distracted, misled, self-absorbed, and fearful society had some reasons to think so. Page 99, as continued on page 100, works well to present one of the key reasons.

.... Overriding distinctions of age, race, and class, transcending the surges and lulls, another number, growing only in one fierce and fatal direction, mesmerized the population: [the total number of American deaths.]. Thinking about death could be forced on anyone, daily. A writer in the Boston Globe condensed common impressions from that period:

It’s hard to remember a year when death was so in your face from morning to night—from pages of obituaries in the morning paper to the nightly news with its images of mobile morgues parked outside overwhelmed hospitals and cemetery workers burying bodies as fast as possible with few mourners present. [top p. 100]: As early as July 2020, a new statistic circulated, that 80 percent of the US dead were over the age of sixty-five. The headline “1 of Every 100 Older Americans Has Perished” appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 2021. The early blare of announcements that residents composed 40 percent of the dead, and in some states over half, was overshadowed. . . . Residents had made up only 0.42 percent of the population. Everyone over sixty-five constituted 16 percent.

Receiving less attention, the residents’ dire conditions may have caused less concern or regret. The most succinct definition of “the expendables” I have found is “people whose disappearance wouldn’t draw attention.” With the onset of a more encompassing dread, that small hapless group was exiled, farther still, from the social embrace.

American Eldercide closely studies a historical moment, the new COVID Era, that was full of unnoticed crises. In this tightly structured book, many themes and feelings from these two pages recur: the role of the media, the misuse of statistics, the fear that is called mortality salience, the mass-mind created by fear, the psychology of divergent groups within that mass.

The previous chapter, “The Hidden Truths of a Corrupt World,” details Trump’s narcissistic ageism and reveals how his administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid carefully disguised malfeasance.

American Eldercide is also full of antidotes to such strange, grim material: reliable facts and warmer ways to feel; policy proposals for reforming the system from public-health experts, and life-saving rules from the Biden administration. The real embrace of justice can come only from anti-ageism--a powerful intersection of feminism, anti-racism, disability activism, progressive theory, and responsible caring.

Learn more about American Eldercide at the University of Chicago Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America.

The Page 99 Test: Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People.

--Marshal Zeringue

Roger Chickering's "The German Empire, 1871–1918"

Roger Chickering is Professor Emeritus of History at Georgetown University. His publications include The Great War and Urban Life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914–1918 (2007) and Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2014).

Chickering applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The German Empire, 1871–1918, and reported the following:

Browsers who crack open this book on page 99 will encounter the revival of Catholic piety in German Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, which culminated during the militant pontificate of Pius IX (1846-78). These developments set the backdrop for the Kulturkampf, the famous “culture war” between the confessions during the first years of the German Empire. This passage does not do well on the Page 99 Test; but I hope this result does not speak to the quality of the whole. The passage presents only an early hint of the broader problems that inform the book.

The third chapter, of which the passage is part, introduces one of several central themes that give shape to the work as a whole. To put the matter in musical terms, the book is designed a little like a fugue, in which the principal themes are introduced early, then developed in their interplay in the body of the work. The main themes are confession (Catholic and Protestant), social class, and regional tension between rural and urban Germany. Along with several other motifs—gender and ethnicity (including the “Jewish problem”)—they are analyzed together as the bases of pervasive sectoral strife in Imperial Germany. The book attends to the organization and mobilization of domestic conflict, political interaction among sectoral groups, questions of integration and national unity, colonialism and foreign policy, and finally the Great War of 1914-18, in which the German Empire perished amid domestic discord—with terrible consequences. The book offers a comprehensive history of the German Empire, a contribution to debates that have raged among historians of Germany for the past seventy years.

Learn more about The German Empire, 1871–1918 at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Carrie J. Preston's "Complicit Participation"

Carrie J. Preston is the Arvind and Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Professor and Director of Kilachand Honors College, Professor of English and Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and the founding Associate Director of the Center on Forced Displacement at Boston University. She is the author of Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, & Solo Performance and Learning to Kneel: Noh, Modernism, & Journeys in Teaching.

Preston applied the “Page 99 Test” to her latest book, Complicit Participation: The Liberal Audience for Theater of Racial Justice, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Complicit Participation appears early in Chapter 4 and describes the history of blackface minstrelsy that informs George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921, and All That Followed (2016), the main focus of the chapter. This history is also important to the performance genealogy of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1959) and its revival at The Classical Theatre of Harlem in 2003 – the topic of Chapter 1 – and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s radical adaptation An Octoroon (2014) – Chapters 2 and 3. From 1830 through the Harlem Renaissance, blackface minstrelsy and later derivatives like jazz, tap dancing, and ragtime were tremendously popular entertainments. They represented an ambivalent fascination with the Black male body and featured cross-gender costumes, dancing, music, and short skits. Page 99 starts the story of the supposed invention of blackface minstrelsy when T. D. Rice overheard the song of a Black stage-driver in Cincinnati singing “Jump Jim Crow.” The section ends with the argument that blackface minstrelsy is more complicated than we tend to assume, especially when the popular press associates minstrelsy with the emergence of offensive pictures of political leaders dressed in blackface in their youth. Minstrelsy was undeniably constructed for racist pleasure, particularly to serve as a pressure valve to relieve competition over jobs. It was also understood, by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass, among others, as having the potential to perform new racial identities and cultivate an audience to appreciate them. Minstrelsy was not simply racist or antiracist, but like so many cultural products, much more complicated.

Readers picking up my book to learn about allyship and audience participation in contemporary theaters of racial justice would probably be surprised to turn to page 99 and find a history of 19th century minstrelsy. In that sense, the Page 99 Test would not introduce the browser to the main concern of my book. At the same time, I am very interested in the longer histories of racial performance that inform contemporary theaters, particularly minstrelsy and melodrama. My book is also particularly committed to the principle that understanding the complexity of historical performance helps us understand our current moment – in relation to theater and activism more generally. I give the Page 99 Test a 5 (out of 10) for my book.

I wrote much of this book during what felt to me like the dark days of the first administration of Donald Trump, never imagining that it would appear in the shadow of his second, nonconsecutive term as president. Much has not changed. I still believe that complicit participation is the prevailing framework through which many white liberals who identify as allies participate in theatrical and other institutional efforts grouped under the rubric of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote the book to improve efforts for racial justice, not undermine them. Yet, in this moment, it can feel like there is no room for critiques of allyship from allies themselves, critiques from within. Today, I would emphasize most that allyship cannot be an individual practice but must involve communities in solidarity, resisting oppression and injustice wherever it emerges.

Learn more about Complicit Participation at the Oxford University Press website

--Marshal Zeringue

George González's "The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism"

George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture at The CUNY Graduate Center and at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project.

González applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change through Performance, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance initiates reflection upon an ethnographic scene that opens Chapter 3, which itself serves as a bridge between the two main sections of the book, Act I, which foregrounds the intellectual and political stakes of the relationships between our mode of consumption and climate catastrophe, and Act II, which centers the life and activism of the New York City-based anti-consumerist and “Earth Justice”-grounded radical performance community, The Stop Shopping Church (aka Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping). In short, reading page 99 would serve the prospective reader of the book well by situating them at an important thematic and analytical crossroads.

Chapter 3 begins with a description of one of the group’s street actions at the turn of the millennium: a small group from the ‘Church,’ led by Reverend Billy, a then parodic performance character developed by William Talen, a musician and actor, processes down the Times Square neighborhood toward the flagship Disney Store carrying two crucified oversized Mickey and Minnie Mouse plush dolls (‘fetishes’) on long sticks. Dressed as a combination of 1980s-style televangelist and Elvis, Reverend Billy preaches that Mickey Mouse is the antichrist. The action is designed to protest the Disney brand’s role in the commodification of sentiment and memory, its gentrification of the theater district, and its exploitation of global sweatshop labor.

Page 99 introduces two key considerations. The first is the historicity of the Marxian “commmodity fetishism.” As it turns out, the very idea of the fetish was born of transcultural encounters between sixteenth and seventeenth century Iberian traders and West African counterparts and reflects the values of the European racial chain of being. The second key consideration introduced on page 99 is Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that capitalism can be understood to be a “religiously conditioned construction” or an “essentially religious phenomenon” in its own right.

Bringing the work of the Stop Shopping Church into conversation with religious studies, performance studies, critical theory, sociology and anthropology, the ethnographic core of the book describes the ways in which the Stop Shopping Church has traditionally deployed the signifiers of American religion to mark and critique the co-constitutions of Evangelical Protestantism and neoliberal capitalism (consumerism as religiously constructed) as well as its organizing social function as religion (consumerism as essentially religious phenomenon). The book describes and analyzes the ways in which the originally parodic Stop Shopping Church has come to function as (in the group’s own words) a “post-religious religious” community grounded in green values and how and why the critique of the fetish (the finger wagging of ‘put down that Mickey Mouse doll!’) has, under the leadership of co-founders William Talen and Savitri D, transformed into a much more radical and capacious political ecology that takes direct critical aim at the ways in which the effects of ritualized consumption boomerang back at us in the form of extreme weather, species extinction, and deadly toxins taking up residence in human bodies (consumer capitalism as systemic ‘Shopocalypse’).

Visit George González's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Salma Monani's "Indigenous Ecocinema"

Salma Monani is a professor at Gettysburg College’s Environmental Studies department. She has extensively published in ecocinema studies, Indigenous ecomedia, and environmental justice. She is co-editor of four ecocritical media anthologies. As part of her College’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, she also engages in public eco-humanities along with community research with Indigenous partners.

Monani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Despite its time-consuming nature, Calder often works independently on her projects. Her decision to work without large crews is deliberate. First, she finds that the process allows her to more easily experience the relational spaces of her stories--“I often think of it as I'm going to the forest today, or I am being confined in that little room, as in Snip.” Second, she rejects the production norms of mainstream animation that employ an estranged Taylorized model of production. Such a model is geared to capitalist efficiency, often churning out films with such slick production that Calder notes they “feel like a roller coaster ride; I’m buckled in, it’s a dynamic thrill.” In contrast, Calder’s low-budget, individually created films are aimed to help audiences “feel” the labor and materials that are so often invisible in mainstream animation’s immersive projects (think Disney, in particular). While Disney might acknowledge some of its high-profile animators (e.g., in “how the film was made” extras), these acknowledgments tend to glamorize the process and hide systems that continue to perpetuate fleshy and earthly violence through problematic labor and environmental practices. For example, Hollywood productions often outsource labor to countries where working conditions are worse than those in home countries; the impacts are felt at home too where workers are laid off…

… Calder refuses to partake in these discriminatory systems. Despite knowing that her production choices might disadvantage her in terms of how quickly she can make a film, she would rather situate her filmmaking within a work ethic that is relationally bound—to her Indigenous communities and the decolonial and ecological messages she presents onscreen. In other words, much like Monnet, Calder is acutely attentive both to how she encodes Indigenous cinema time(s) onscreen and to how she grounds her production in material practices that honor Native being in time as relational processes of living ethically and in kinship with the human and more-than-human world.

The excerpt from page 99 works well to provide a partial snapshot of the book’s goals as it draws attention to the ecological dimensions of one Indigenous filmmaker, stop-motion animator Terril Calder (Métis)’ cinema practices. In the book, I argue that we can learn a lot about a) how cinema—its onscreen messages as well as its off-screen production, reception and distribution practices—are enmeshed in environmental contexts, and b) how contemporary Indigenous cinema helps us re-evaluate these enmeshments with an eye to social and environmental justice. Essentially, a goal of Indigenous Ecocinema is to bring ecocritical attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive, and simultaneously, another goal is to bring, Indigenous intellectual voices front and center into (eco)cinema conversations. Interlacing these two goals, the book offers d-ecocinema criticism, a methodological approach that invites Indigenous (and, thus relatedly, decolonial) frames to our understandings of cinema’s ecological entanglements.

In this excerpt, Calder reflects on her cinema, comparing it to the practices of mainstream animation cinema industries. In discussing her process of working independently, despite the time it takes, Calder helps direct our attention to the environmental and social justice implications of cinema production. At the end of the excerpt, I mention another filmmaker (Caroline Monnet, an Anishinaabe/French experimental artist) whose work is also ethically oriented to ecosocial justice. Throughout the book, I showcase film creatives who challenge the business-as-usual modes of cinema industries and instead engage in cinema practices that engage land and community responsibilities, on and off screen.

Not surprisingly, it would be a lot to ask one page of the book to best capture Indigenous Ecocinema’s broader goal to offer the methodological approach of d-ecocinema criticism. The page definitely implies this goal as I foreground Calder’s insights as essential to my analyses. However, this excerpt does not demonstrate how extensively I draw on Indigenous intellectual thought and scholarship to expand the current purview of (eco)critical cinema theory and practice. To engage with this broader goal, I invite you to read the book, which explores three essential ingredients of cinema worlds—place, time, and feelings. Spotlighting these three components, the book reads Indigenous cinema as d-ecocinema (with attention to decolonial and ecological frames of reference) and offers cinema aficionados and scholars alike a roadmap to re-orient away from current business-as-usual extractive and exploitative media environments.

Learn more about Indigenous Ecocinema at the West Virginia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Suzanna Krivulskaya's "Disgraced"

Suzanna Krivulskaya is Associate Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in gender, religion, and digital history. She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion.

Her first book is Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism. The monograph is a sweeping religious and cultural history of ministerial sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates how pastoral sex scandals have been covered in the popular press and how Protestant denominations and the reading public responded to the coverage.

Krivulskaya applied the “Page 99 Test” to Disgraced and reported the following:

Page 99 contains snippets of two of the many stories I tell in the book—these two from the early twentieth century. The first is about how an anonymous letter alleging homosexual activity and an internal Presbyterian investigation resulted in a quiet dismissal of John Balcom Shaw, an early fundamentalist leader, in 1918. To demonstrate how Protestant denominations began dealing with the epidemic of sex scandals, I write, “The Presbyterians succeeded in handling Shaw’s case internally and relegated his sexual proclivities to the realm of mental health.” (Shaw had been advised to admit himself to a sanitarium by the men in charge of the investigation.)

The second case, which I begin telling on page 99, is about the Episcopal Navy chaplain Samuel Neal Kent, who was accused of paying sailors for sexual favors in 1919. I explain that “during his trial, details of the government-sanctioned investigation by means of engagement with the alleged homosexuals shocked the public.” (The Navy had instructed undercover officers to obtain evidence of homosexual activity by engaging in it with the accused sailors and the chaplain.) Although the Episcopal Church initially stood by Kent, he was transferred to a different post shortly after his acquittal and left religious work altogether in 1921. This case, along with a handful of others, demonstrates that by the 1920s, Protestant denominations had begun to grapple with the best tactics for managing the sex scandals that kept plaguing them. While some labored to hide them, others attempted to defend the accused clergy—even if they ultimately chose to part ways with problematic ministers.

Page 99 gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, though its scope is limited to two particular scandals that are representative of broader changes that I describe in the monograph. One way in which page 99 is a poor representation of the book is the fact that both cases featured here had previously been written about by other scholars: Kathryn Lofton first taught us about Shaw in her article “Queering Fundamentalism,” and George Chauncey and John Loughery have described the Kent debacle in their work. While Disgraced certainly builds on the insights of these and other historians, it also introduces many new stories, characters, and conclusions—particularly about the multi-decade trajectory of how sex scandals transformed American religion.

Visit Suzanna Krivulskaya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sara Lodge's "The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective"

Sara Lodge is senior lecturer in Victorian literature and culture at the University of St Andrews. Her last book, Inventing Edward Lear, was described by Jenny Uglow as “by far the best thing I have ever read on Lear.”

Lodge applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, and reported the following:

You might get your kicks on page 66. But on page 99, you will find a key line. My book, The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, is about real-life women in the nineteenth century who worked to solve mysteries, crimes, and to detect malfeasance, whether with the police or as private enquiry agents. But it’s also about the myth of the female detective as it developed on the Victorian stage and page. Page 99 is in the chapter on theatre. It describes the stage appearance of Sara Lane – actor-manager of London’s Britannia theatre– in Colin Henry Hazlewood’s play The Female Detective, in 1865. A key feature of the role was to emphasize Lane’s dramatic powers. The female detective could convince the public that she was anyone at all: male or female, old or young, from anywhere in the world:

In a tour de force of quick-change versatility, she metamorphoses into Grizzle Gutteridge (‘a Somersetshire Wench’), Mrs Gammage (an ancient Nurse), Mr Harry Racket (a fast young Man) and Barney O’Brian (an Irish boy ‘from the bogs of Ballyragget’). Such protean dramatic changes required great skill: they were a visible masterclass in acting, where the lead actress showed her many different faces, accents and costumes.

FLORENCE: I hear you’re a widder, mim –– so am I; matrimony’s a serus thing – I declare I never shall forget how I felt when Gammage said, “With my goods I thee endow.” He kept a furniture shop, mim, but when he died I found I was mistaken, and I was left executioner to an intestine estate, with everybody a trying to circumvent the poor widow’s mite, mim. Oh, dear! (cries)

Of course, Sara Lane playing Florence playing Mrs Gammage, who can’t tell an executor from an executioner, is not to be taken entirely seriously. Yet the point she makes about women being cheated in marriage recurs throughout the play. Florence Langton constantly berates the male sex, remarking: ‘That’s just like those horrid men. I begin to think it’s high time they were abolished altogether’ and ‘this monstrosity on two legs, called a man’; ‘what men say and what they do are two very different things.’ She sings the song from Much Ado about Nothing. ‘Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more / Men were deceivers ever’– but unlike Shakespeare’s female leads Beatrice and Hero, Florence and Una remain happily single at the play’s end. Women’s legal vulnerability in marriage is a persistent theme.

Although page 99 only showcases one aspect of my research – the female detective in Victorian theatre – it does pick up a theme that will recur throughout the book. The feisty female detective character responds to male violence and abuse and reflects real concerns about women’s safety and women’s rights in this period. Domestic violence in this play is a key predictor of public felonies. Though Hazlewood’s play is a melodrama, with a sensational plot, this contention is accurate. Women’s ‘natural curiosity’, and decision to ‘act’ in a detective role is depicted as a necessary corrective to male deception.

Throughout its chapters, my book compares the moral ambiguities of women’s real- life investigative cases in the Victorian period and the ways in which Victorians imagined female detectives, often as heroines with aspirational physical and mental powers. There is a gulf—then as now – between our desire for strong women to be able to secure other women’s safety, and the realities of law enforcement. But staging the female detective – whether it is Sara Lane or Kate Winslet playing her – is one way of asserting women’s right to get even, and to be who they choose to be.

Learn more about The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Derek W. Black's "Dangerous Learning"

Derek W. Black holds the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina Law School, where he directs the university’s Constitutional Law Center.

In 2020, his book, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy, warned that current education trends represent a retreat from our nation’s foundational commitments to democracy and public education.

Black applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Dangerous Learning: The South's Long War on Black Literacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 drops the reader at a major crossroads in America history and, more specifically, Virginia’s history. Nat Turner has just led the highest profile slave revolt in U.S. history and is still at a large. John Floyd, the governor of Virginia at the time, has his misgivings about slavery but has a crisis to address, so he targets abolitionist newspapers—like William Llyod Garrison’s The Liberator—as a source of the evil the state has just experienced.

Focused solely on Virginia in the 1830s, page 99 cannot directly portray the book’s larger national narrative of the fight for freedom through black literacy, newspapers, and ultimately public education. But page 99 captures the tension that pervades so many of the most important moments in the book. Floyd leads a slaveholding state, but on the very next page, he hatches his plan to see the institution’s end. A few months later, the Virginia General Assembly is openly debating the abolition of slavery—something almost unimaginable in retrospect. That debate, in my estimation, was the South’s last gasp of rationality. From there, the South sets out on a path that can only end in war. Black literacy, independent newspapers, open debate, and a toleration of those with different perspectives all fall victim—often violently—along that path.

Those moments speak most directly to issues of race, but they are also cautionary tales of what happens when society or government refuse to allow any choir other than their own sing. And sadly, the paranoia about foreign ideas, black literacy, and what would become of the South never leaves. Though public education triumphantly rises from the ashes of the Civil War three decades later—largely through the demands and efforts of black people—old suspicions in the white community persist, trying to take public education down and control its narratives.

Visit Derek W. Black's website.

The Page 99 Test: Schoolhouse Burning.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marlene L. Daut's "The First and Last King of Haiti"

Marlene L. Daut is Professor of French, African American Studies, and History at Yale University. She is the author of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (2024); the award-winning Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution (2023); Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (2017); and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2015).

Daut applied the “Page 99 Test” to The First and Last King of Haiti and reported the following:

On page 99, I am in the process of describing the French colonists’ murderous response to the beginning of the Black freedom struggle to end slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that we now call the Haitian Revolution. One of the architects of the initial August 1791 freedom strike was a man named Boukman. In retaliation for the fact that he and the other freedom fighters set fire to the northern plain in less than one month, the colonists put a bounty on his head. Unfortunately, this offer of monetary compensation succeeded when a colonist named M. Michel brought the decapitated freedom leader’s head to French officials and claimed the promised 6,000 colonial livres. Because the hotel where Christophe worked in Saint-Domingue, called La Couronne, is centrally located in the colony’s principal port town, Cap-Français, I suggest that if Christophe remained employed there in the early days of the Revolution, he may have witnessed this flurry of revolutionary activity that ended with Boukman’s head posted on a pike as a warning to the other freedom fighters.

At first glance, the page 99 test does not seem to work well for my book, which is about Christophe’s rise to King of Haiti in the post-revolutionary era, and his eventual downfall in 1820 due to a conspiracy that formed against him, resulting in his death. However, if we follow to the next page the story about Boukman, Cap-Français, and the French commissioners and soldiers who arrive in fall 1791 to stop the freedom struggle, something a bit remarkable happens. At the very end of page 100, I discuss how the remaining leaders of the post-Boukman freedom struggle, which included the famous Toussaint Louverture but not Christophe, attempted to negotiate with French authorities. In a letter they sent to French authorities in fall 1791 they state that if the French colonists give in to their freedom demands, “public prosperity will be reborn from its ashes.” This, of course, is a highly resonant and supremely relevant phrase, since as I wrote on this page, it “later became a part of Christophe’s motto as king of Haiti.”

Visit Marlene L. Daut's website.

The Page 99 Test: Awakening the Ashes.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew Hui's "The Study"

Andrew Hui is associate professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is the author of A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter and The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries, and reported the following:

Page 99 of the study is a reading of a beautiful painting of the Annunciation by Domenico Ghirlandaio. I do an analysis of its formal pictorial elements and how they gesture to deeper theological significance. I then talk about how 'volume' means both a space and a book. This is within my Chapter 3, “Bookishness and Sanctity,” which explores how the Renaissance iconology of the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome depicted both saints as bookworms, thereby elevating bibliophilia into a form of holiness. This is part of my broader argument about the genesis of the personal library, or studiolo, in early modern Europe.

I’m delighted that Marshal invited me to do the Page 99 Test again (I did it for my previous book A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter). The Page 99 Test is one of those charming literary parlor games that flatters our sense of the microcosmic—the idea that a single page, plucked like a Tarot card, can reveal a book’s “true” shape. It’s deliciously self-deluded, like squinting at the corner of a Vermeer and deciding you’ve understood the early modern Dutch Republic (although...maybe there is something to that...). There’s a fractal allure to it, certainly, but why not page 42, or 287? Perhaps analysis always lies in the interstices between the allegorical and the arbitrary.

And yet, perhaps it is fitting that it is page 99—a number with its own mystic aura—that gives us the Annunciation, and with it, the Virgin Mary herself. For believers, the Virgin is the font of all honors and virtues, the sublime mediator between heaven and earth. How charming, then, that she should appear at the axis mundi of the text, the book’s golden mean—page 99—the liminal point from which everything unfolds. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s the kind of coincidence medieval thinkers would have loved: neither wholly arbitrary nor entirely rational, existing in the space where grace and geometry intersect.

Learn more about The Study at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: A Theory of the Aphorism.

--Marshal Zeringue