Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Amin Ghaziani's "Long Live Queer Nightlife"

Amin Ghaziani is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia. He is the award-winning author of The Dividends of Dissent, Sex Cultures, and There Goes the Gayborhood?. His work has been featured widely in international media outlets, including the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, USA Today, and British Vogue.

Ghaziani applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution, and reported the following:
Imagine that you have handed me years of journal or diary entries. Now, watch as I select one random page from among the hundreds that animate your life. I say to you, “I wonder if I would get a good or a poor idea of the whole of your life from this one page.” How would you respond?

I am delighted about the publication of my new book, Long Live Queer Nightlife. Unlike an essay or academic article, the format of a book invites the writer, and the reader, into a collaborative, long term, slow-mo relationship with a set of ideas. For me, this includes trying to understand why LGBTQ+ venues are closing around the world, how local governments are responding, moving from City Hall to the streets and asking people about their impressions, strategizing about how to exploit the structural weakness of capitalism, sharing personal experiences of exclusion from my life, connecting those experiences with the specter of non-belonging that the 112 people I interviewed bravely shared with me, seeing how queer creatives cultivate nightlife scenes defined by intentional inclusion and an intersectional queerness, and emphasizing the life-enhancing and deeply political virtues of joy.

Page 99, by itself, cannot possible let you see or feel these powerful sinews of nightlife, particularly the underground scenes where I take you in the book.

Still, the page is interesting on its own. It involves a discussion about the Joiners, a legendary pub in East London that closed. What happened to the Joiners was not an isolated incident but, rather, part of a systemic threat of redevelopment. On page 99, you can appreciate my commitments to shifting from deficit and decline (an emphasis on closures) to asset (accenting strategies of preservation and creation). One approach that activists are pursuing, as you will read about on page 99, is a planning principle called “Asset of Community Value.” The listing gives activists priority to purchase the building and to determine its future use. Their goal is to reopen the space as London’s first community-owned and community-run pub.

Whether you start on page 99, the beginning of the book, or jump elsewhere into it, I hope you enjoy the party—and understand afresh why queer nightlife matters.
Visit Amin Ghaziani's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

George G. Szpiro's "Perplexing Paradoxes"

George G. Szpiro is an author and journalist who was a longtime correspondent for the Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung. His many books include Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present (2010) and Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty: Three Centuries of Economic Decision-Making (2020). Szpiro was on the faculty at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Perplexing Paradoxes: Unraveling Enigmas in the World Around Us, and reported the following:
On page 99 you will see nothing but a picture of 10,000 dots randomly scattered within a square that contains an inscribed circle. The caption says “Simulating the number Pi.”

The graph is an illustration of the paradox – and the power -- of random numbers. The paradox is that if someone shows you a sequence of numbers, claiming that they are random, there is no way of verifying that they are, in fact, random. Because if you ‘recognize’ the sequence as random, it is, by definition, not random.

The power of random numbers, on the other hand, is that one can use them for many kinds of simulations. For example -- and this is what is shown on page 99 -- by counting the randomly generated dots that fall within the inscribed circle, and dividing that number by the total of all the points in the square (10,000 in our case), one actually simulates the number Pi (3.14159…). This technique of using random numbers is called Monte Carlo simulation, after the famous casino in France.

Page 99 on its own would be an unfortunate choice for casual browsing because browsers may erroneously believe that this is a book about mathematics. Unless they are open to learning about mathematical ideas, they may be discouraged from exploring the book further. And they would miss out because, firstly, the paradox of random numbers is not very mathematical, and, secondly, it is only one paradox out of sixty that I describe in the book. There are many more paradoxes about subjects like economics, linguistics, religion, law, philosophy, logic … and yes, also about mathematics, physics and statistics.
Visit George G. Szpiro's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 25, 2024

Felicia B. George's "When Detroit Played the Numbers"

Felicia B. George is a native Detroiter who loves Detroit history and culture. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from Wayne State University, where she is now an adjunct professor.

George applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, When Detroit Played the Numbers: Gambling's History and Cultural Impact on the Motor City, and reported the following:
On page 99, readers catch a glimpse of a sensational trial that rocked Detroit in the early 1940s, involving numbers banker Everett Watson. In 1940s Detroit, a realty company operated entirely by blacks, led by Watson, garnered praise for extending loans to black Detroiters when other institutions refused, enabling numerous black Detroiters to purchase homes and businesses. However, Watson and his associates found themselves embroiled in a significant trial related to a numbers graft conspiracy, one of the largest gambling criminal trials in the country at the time. The prosecutor, Chester O’Hara, systematically excluded black jurors, justifying it with prejudiced views about black Detroiters and their supposed involvement in gambling. This bias was reinforced by societal stereotypes, as evidenced by a department store advertisement perpetuating the belief that blacks were superstitious gamblers. Page 99 illuminates the systemic racism and discrimination prevalent in the justice system and society at large during that period.

Does page 99 effectively provide readers with an accurate snapshot of the book? To some extent. Page 99 offers a glimpse into the broader narrative of "playing the numbers," or the illegal lottery, in Detroit. It serves to introduce readers to my writing style and offers just enough insight into the book to awaken their interest. While the page encapsulates one of the important themes of the book, it represents only a small fraction of a much larger story that traces the history of numbers gambling from 1919 to the 2000s and does not fully portray the unfolding of other crucial themes and events integral to the history of numbers gambling in Detroit.

When Detroit Played the Numbers is a gritty tale of ingenuity and determination, taking readers on a journey exploring how playing the numbers evolved from a state-condemned crime to an encouraged legal activity. It delves into issues of race, politics, and the scandals that emerged along the way. Readers will discover how the nickels and dimes wagered by Detroiters contributed to the rise of Joe Louis's career. They will witness the ousting of a Detroit mayor supported by the Ku Klux Klan and revisit the sensational trial that dominated the city's headlines for over three years, resulting in the incarceration of the city's former mayor, county prosecutor, county sheriff, several Detroit Police officers, and two of Detroit's most influential numbers operators. This is a tale teeming with the highs and lows of the city, offering just one of many narratives reflecting Detroit's hopes and dreams.
Learn more about When Detroit Played the Numbers at the Wayne State University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Rachel S. Gross's "Shopping All the Way to the Woods"

Rachel S. Gross is an environmental and cultural historian of the modern U.S. and an assistant professor of history at the University of Colorado Denver.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Shopping All the Way to the Woods plants us in the post-World War II era when army navy stores were the main way that Americans shopping for outdoor activities found gear. Americans who bought army surplus clothing and equipment liked the thrill of the shopping experience where they searched through piles of junk to find well-priced treasures. Radio and television shows of the 1950s captured the war surplus shop experience by poking fun at the shoppers who encountered unexpected, and sometimes useless inventory.

Page 99 captures three important insights from the book, so the test works reasonably well. First, it shows what the experience of acquiring outdoor gear looked like—messy, fun, sometimes even a little silly. Second, it highlights the theme of authenticity, which was crucial to many outdoor consumers not just in the 1950s but throughout the century. Finally, the page situates readers in a longer arc of twentieth century commercial transformations: products that came from the military were transitioning to a civilian market.

Nonetheless, the page does not capture the book’s larger argument about the construction of the outdoor identity. Nor does it point to the products, especially down sleeping bags and tents, that many readers will enjoy in this chapter on “Pup Tents and Mummy Bags: Spreading Surplus to the Masses.”
Visit Rachel S. Gross's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Jessica Carey-Webb's "Eyes on Amazonia"

Jessica Carey-Webb is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. Her research specializes in environmental cultural studies of Latin America. In particular, she focuses on the historical development, environmental representation, and sustainable future of the Brazilian Amazon.

Carey-Webb applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier delves into one of the key characters in the book, the Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade. It explains his complicated relationship to his own racial identity and some of the aspects of the Brazilian modernist movement, a conflicted movement itself which sought to synthesize a European avant-garde with a national identity rooted in uniquely Brazilian cultural aspects (such as indigeneity, environment, colonial history, etc.). This page presents Andrade’s Amazonian travel narrative, The Apprentice Tourist, describing his approach toward Amazonian culture which subscribes to some aspects of a modernist ethos, but also deviates in his signature sardonic and playful style.

Page 99 gives a decent summary of the work as a whole. While the book examines a multitude of different international explorers who went to the Amazon to document their findings primarily during the first rubber boom (1875-1912), this page and chapter instead examine the legacies of the rubber boom from Andrade’s perspective written in 1927-28. Andrade is one of the most famous Brazilian authors of all time whose journey in the Amazon is somewhat underexamined, and the page is thus representative of the book as it examines both central and peripheral explorers of the Amazon. Page 99 also mentions other topics that are of importance to the book including racial and personal identity, portrayals of indigeneity by non-Indigenous people, and the travel narrative form. Page 99 situates Andrades’ travel narrative within an international framework and the various cultural movements occurring globally, however it does not address the environmental implications of his work, a central aspect of the book overall.

Eyes on Amazonia addresses exploratory missions (from French, Brazilian, North American, German, and Colombian perspectives) that mapped, photographed, and wrote about their visions for the future of Indigenous people and the environment. The book offers five comparative case studies of traveler’s representations of Amazonia from diverse source materials, in multiple languages, by explorers from different countries of origin, and with wide-ranging views of the region and its peoples. While sharing histories of their own experiences, these travel writers all traverse territories under extreme economic and environmental exploitation at varying moments of emerging national authority. Their depictions demonstrate the unequal power dynamics within the Amazonian “contact zone.” As travelers in the Amazon region, the authors in Eyes on Amazonia project futuristic ideas onto a space that is foreign to them, and, in turn, they write highly racialized visions of their surroundings.
Learn more about Eyes on Amazonia at the Vanderbilt University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Friday, March 22, 2024

Jeffrey E. Anderson's "Voodoo: An African American Religion"

Jeffrey E. Anderson is professor of history and associate director of the School of Humanities at the University of Louisiana–Monroe. He is author of The Voodoo Encyclopedia: Magic, Ritual, and Religion; Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Conjure: A Handbook; and Conjure in African American Society.

Anderson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Voodoo: An African American Religion, and reported the following:
Page 99 is one of my favorites in Voodoo: An African American Religion. At the top of it is a picture of Lala Hopkins, a Voodoo practitioner interviewed and photographed by the Louisiana Writers’ Project sometime around 1940. She was dressed in a Mardi Gras costume and was performing a ritual while dancing or pacing beside some burning candles, which are just visible at the right-hand bottom of the image. Below the picture, the first full sentence reads, “Lala Hopkins likewise provided them [Louisiana Writers’ Project workers] with a spell that combined the Catholic feature of candles with distinctly non-Christian elements of animal sacrifice and supplication of a deity whom she called Onzoncare, known elsewhere as Assonquer.” Immediately following this sentence is a new paragraph that focuses on amulets from Missouri, known as luck balls.

While the picture and small amount of text do not capture every aspect of Voodoo, they certainly hit on some of its key features. First, both the picture and text regarding Lala Hopkins is an excellent illustration of my overarching goal of explaining Voodoo as a distinctly African American faith. While it clearly embodied African spirituality, it was not simply an African or even Haitian religion transplanted to the U.S. Instead, while its ancestry stretches most directly to the religions and magic of Benin, Senegal, and the Congos, it has been far from static and readily adapted to its new home in the Mississippi River Valley.

The second paragraph, which describes an aspect of the style of Voodoo once practiced in Missouri, illustrates one of my secondary goals: emphasizing that the religion was not confined to New Orleans. While it is true that most of the written sources describing the faith focus on the city, that is primarily because it was a major urban area well before the Civil War with multiple newspapers and a constant stream of new arrivals to whom journalists could direct sensational tales of Voodoo rites. The reputation of New Orleans as the home of Voodoo survived the Civil War and attracted later writers and researchers, among them Zora Neale Hurston and Robert Tallant, who elaborated on the work of their predecessors. On the other hand, credible witnesses describe the religion elsewhere along the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast, with the best descriptions surviving from Missouri.

Having defined Voodoo as an African American religion centered on the Mississippi River Valley, I have done my best to accurately trace its history starting with its African roots through the ordeal of slavery in the colonial and antebellum South to the 1940s, when the Louisiana Writers’ Project supplied both the best and last descriptions of its initiations.
Learn more about Voodoo: An African American Religion at the LSU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez's "How Sanctions Work"

Narges Bajoghli is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins SAIS. Vali Nasr is Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins SAIS. Djavad Salehi-Isfahani is Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech. Ali Vaez is the Director of the International Crisis Group Iran Project.

Salehi-Isfahani applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, and reported the following:
Page 99 of our book begins a section entitled, “Impact on the Middle Class.” It uses household survey data to show that US comprehensive sanctions have hurt Iran’s middle class. The section uses familiar criteria to define middle class status using per capita household expenditures from survey data, which considers as middle class all individuals with expenditures between twice and five times the World Bank poverty line of about $6.60 per person per day (in 2017 Purchasing Power Parity dollars). According to this definition, since 2011 (before sanctions) about 8 million Iranians (or 10% of the population) have fallen into lower income groups. Compared to where the middle class share would have been had the country continued to grow normally the loss is at least twice as large.

In the case of Iran, the middle class plays a particularly important role in the country’s social and political development. This is because much of the tensions in the Islamic Republic result from the wide gap between the government’s strict interpretation of the pious lifestyle and its anti-western ideology and the aspirations of a rising middle class. So, if I had to pick a page that best communicates the message of the book, page 99 would be as good as any.

To be sure, the heaviest cost of the punitive US sanctions has been borne by the poor, who cannot afford to lose more income, not the middle class. Poverty rates are now twice their 2011 level. Western proponents of sanctions had hoped that an immiserizing population would force its government to accede to US demands. The book argues that in this sense sanctions have failed. At no point in the past decade has the Islamic regime seemed in danger of losing control, and it has not changed its behavior in a manner the US had hoped for. Indeed, as recent events demonstrate, years of harsh sanctions have strengthened – not weakened -- Iran’s position as a regional power, posing an even bigger challenge to US hegemony in the Middle East than in the past.

Our book suggests an explanation for this adverse outcome: Having crushed the main source of political moderation in Iran—the middle class – US sanctions have empowered an adversary.
Learn more about How Sanctions Work at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Emily Conroy-Krutz's "Missionary Diplomacy"

Emily Conroy-Krutz is a historian of nineteenth-century America specializing in global history of the early American republic. She has particular interests in American empire and the international dimensions of American religion and reform. He first book, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (2015) focuses on the American foreign mission movement and American imperialism through the 1840s. Her second book, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (2024) focuses on the connections between Protestant missions and the US Department of State from 1810 to 1924. She teaches at Michigan State University.

Conroy-Krutz applied the “Page 99 Test” to Missionary Diplomacy and reported the following:
Page 99 of Missionary Diplomacy finds us in the Ottoman Empire, where American missionaries are asking the United States to send more consular representatives to support them in their work. Missionaries did not think there was a sufficient American presence in the region to guarantee their safety. Yet this did not stop them from proceeding. Instead, they appealed to the government to extend its reach. At the center of the page, we see missionaries celebrating the arrival of US warships in 1834. They were relieved at “the sight of our flag” and expected that the show of American strength would allow them to “derive important protection in times of danger.”

So how does the Page 99 Test work for Missionary Diplomacy? Surprisingly well, actually. It’s hard to get the essence of a 275-page book on a single page, but this discussion of missionary connections to the consular system helps to get at some of the book’s central themes. How did missionaries shape American diplomacy? And how was the mission movement shaped by American policy? These questions guided much of the book’s research, and we can see some of the answers to both questions play out in this short snippet from the larger text.

In the first hundred pages of the book, readers will have learned about the different geographies of the early nineteenth century missionary and diplomatic projects. Missionary interest in “converting the world” had them seeking out places that were not of immediate concern to American diplomats in the first half of the century—Asia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Missionaries positioned themselves as the American experts on these regions of the world and sought to direct American attention to (and shape American understandings of) the places that they cared about. Over the course of the century, this saw missionaries calling for a more robust diplomatic and consular presence across the globe. The 1834 missionaries celebrating the arrival of warships provide one example of an entanglement that would only grow over the course of the century.

The rest of the book examines the ways that missionaries drew American diplomats into new spaces, shaped discussions about foreign policy, and framed global issues for an American audience. Chapters explore mission work in China, Japan, Korea, the Caroline Islands, Hawaii, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Congo, and more. If the idea of missionaries cheering at the sight of warships surprises you, the book will provide many opportunities to consider the ways that the mission movement both shaped and was shaped by American foreign policy through the first world war.
Visit Emily Conroy-Krutz's website.

The Page 99 Test: Christian Imperialism.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Elizabeth Pearson's "Extreme Britain"

Elizabeth Pearson, formerly a BBC radio journalist, is Lecturer in Criminology with the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism. She co-authored Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter.

Pearson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Extreme Britain: Gender, Masculinity and Radicalization, and reported the following:
Extreme Britain is about masculinities in extreme groups, and by chance, this page explains a key concept, ‘masculinity challenges’, and how they feature in pathways to the anti-Islam far right. The important point here is that violence and confrontation have meaning that is rooted in class and place. Violence enables men – and women too, but I get to that later - to claim the ideological ownership of physical space. Violence helps create extreme men and on this page, one far right activist, formerly in the British Army, explains a milestone moment of violence in his path to the far right.

The Page 99 test works really well in telling readers what Extreme Britain is about. The book explores radicalisation as a ‘masculinity project’: extremists aim to fulfil certain ideals of manhood in their radicalisation journeys. Violence, class, race and faith are really essential to the stories that ‘extremists’ in both the far right, and in a quasi-jihadist network, told me about how their lives turned out. And masculinity is a useful concept to understand how these actors understand themselves: what kind of manhood they aspire to, how women fit into hierarchies of gender and power in their groups, what kinds of sexual and moral behaviours make real men – and women.

Page 99 is in a chapter about the lives of the far-right actors before they joined the group. It shows how their gender values relate to their ideas about citizenship, and Britishness. It also shows how much their identities are rooted in their local spaces, friendships and antagonisms. In the next chapter, the book goes on to show how those gender values and masculinities are exploited in far-right groups, how they are continued there, and amplified. For instance, the idea that real men can handle themselves on the street, in a fight, to protect ‘their’ women and culture, and that elite liberals who cannot do that are inauthentic, and have no right to condescend to them on how they live.

What the page doesn’t reveal is the different masculinities and values in the jihadist network. Nor does it explain how women navigate these male-dominated groups, and the strategies they use to deal with the misogyny inherent in extreme networks, to take their place, and even to lead organisations, in the case of the far right.

The book is about Britain, but anyone who follows US politics, and is interested in populism, the far right and anti-Islam rhetoric will find a lot here that resonates. Masculine competition, misogyny, class and wider attitudes towards feminism and the state are key to understanding the popularity of Donald Trump, admired by all the far-right actors in my book. Page 99 encapsulates much of this and is a great place to start – (although I’d still recommend readers begin the book at page 1!)
Learn more about Extreme Britain at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Monday, March 18, 2024

Kristin M. Girten's "Sensitive Witnesses"

Kristin M. Girten is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism in the British Enlightenment, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book Sensitive Witnesses, I present a fundamental distinction between two highly popular and influential periodicals of the eighteenth century: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator (1711-12) and Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator (1744-46). The former is perhaps best known as a highly popular and influential accompaniment to eighteenth-century British coffee-house culture, which was instrumental in helping to establish the modern public sphere. The latter is often characterized as the first periodical written by a woman for women—and thus viewed as having set the stage for today’s glamour magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue. As its title attests, The Female Spectator broadcasts its association to Addison and Steele’s earlier publication. Throughout its copious pages, Haywood’s eponymous narrator regularly refers to “Mr. Spectator” as her “brother.” Moreover, Haywood adopts and adapts many of The Spectator’s key features. For instance, though they both center around an eponymous narrator, they are portrayed as having been conceived and composed by a committee. Furthermore, they both similarly appeal to a broad readership (including both men and women), inviting their readers to become correspondents and regularly including and responding to their readers’ letters in their papers. (It is uncertain whether the letters they incorporate are real or fictional.) However, on page 99, I present one key way in which Haywood’s Female Spectator deviates from its predecessor: namely, in its portrayal of sympathy. I argue that, whereas The Spectator models and promotes a version of sympathy that corresponds to what would be theorized by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) a few decades after the periodical’s publication, Haywood’s Female Spectator embodies a version of sympathy that instead accords with that portrayed by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739). Moreover, I demonstrate on page 99 that Smith’s theory of sympathy is founded on a notion of impartiality whereby the ability of one to feel sympathy for another is contingent on one’s success at cultivating a sense of indifference. Somewhat ironically, according to Smith, it is only when we can “moderate” our feelings through indifference that we are able to feel for another person (which Smith portrays as “form[ing] some idea of his sensations.” It is such a conception of sympathy that Addison and Steele’s Spectator exemplifies and from which Haywood’s Female Spectator departs.

Page 99 focuses on the antithesis of the sensitive witness—the “impartial observer,” which I characterize throughout the book as a “modest witness.” However, as the sensitive witnesses my book studies regularly perceive and style themselves in critical opposition to the modest witness, to recognize who the sensitive witness is not is to gain valuable insight into who she is. In fact, the feminist materialists my book explores perceived the practice of sensitive witnessing as both a challenge and alternative to the practice of modest witnessing. Moreover, it was precisely the modest witness’s claim to indifference they repudiated. Informed by materialism, they disputed the feasibility of such indifference, insisting instead that to be a creature in this atomically infused cosmos is to be radically open to one’s environment and, thus, to be constantly and irresistibly vulnerable (sensitive) to stimulation.

Page 99 sets up my discussion of how Eliza Haywood criticizes the indifference and related masculine modesty cultivated, asserted, and encouraged by The Spectator. Though Haywood’s parodic technique is unique, the criticism she poses is illustrative of the critical thread that distinguishes and runs throughout the various feminist works my book addresses. Not all of the authors I study are as overtly concerned with sympathy as Haywood is. However, all of the sensitive witnesses my book explores were similarly critical of the presumption of “impartiality” that Adam Smith as well as Addison and Steele encouraged and performed. Moreover, informed by a sense of material continuity, sensitive witnessing is distinguished by a belief in the kinship between self and other, which resonates with Haywood’s Humean understanding of sympathy. Whereas the modest witness evokes Smith’s “impartial spectator,” the sensitive witness challenges notions of impartiality and perceives relationships as based on connectedness (or, to quote Hume, “resemblance”) rather than separation.

Sensitive Witnesses shows how a group of female British authors of the Enlightenment transformed their perceived propensity, as women, to be distinctly sensitive or sympathetic to others from a philosophical impediment into a philosophical advantage. They employ principles of Epicurean materialism to show the infeasibility of the impartiality and masculine modesty that their male philosophical counterpart frequently claimed for themselves. With support from these principles, they encourage their readers—both male and female—to trade modesty for sensitivity, suggesting that doing so is not only appropriate given the nature of the cosmos but also beneficial to scientific discovery.
Learn more about Sensitive Witnesses at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue