Reading Across Worlds

Transnational Book Groups and the Reception of Difference

J. Procter, B. Benwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349446650, 9781137276391
• eBook ISBN: 9781137276407
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Combining sustained empirical analysis of reading group conversations with four case studies of classic and contemporary novels: Things Fall Apart, White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island, this book pursues what can be gained through a comparative approach to reading and readerships.

1

Introduction

This is a book about how readers beyond the academy talk about, use and make sense of a literature that publishers and bookstores, the press and professional critics have variously labelled ‘multicultural’, ‘international’, ‘diasporic’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘global’, ‘postcolonial’, ‘Third World’ or, more recently, ‘World’. What does this loosely defined genre of writing, which below encompasses work from Chinua Achebe’s early classic Things Fall Apart (1958) to contemporary bestsellers like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), come to look like when it is no longer reserved for the particular purposes of specialised interpretation and classification? How is meaning production extended by other kinds of reader and other genres of reading? Where is reading to be located if not in seminar rooms, journal articles and books? In the broad spirit of Janice Radway’s (1984) classic account of the everyday readers of romance fiction, what follows is an attempt to understand how reading groups and regular readers decode, denounce and delight in a body of fictional texts that have been largely detached from their daily scenes of general consumption.

Where Reading Across Worlds departs from Radway’s Reading the Romance, and from most other ethnographies of reading (see, for example, Devlin-Glass, 2001; Barstow, 2003; Long, 2003; Poole, 2003; Twomey, 2007) is in its comparative emphasis on a series of geographically dispersed, ethnically diverse texts, and readers viewed within transnational circuits of exchange and consumption. Catherine Burwell (2007) has argued that by using isolated and localised North American fieldwork (e.g. Radway’s anonymised mid-Western town or Elizabeth Long’s Houston) to extrapolate wider conclusions about the roles of women in contemporary society, available accounts of the reader tend to assume a ‘global sisterhood’ that risk universalising the experiences of white Western women. Burwell goes on to argue that these otherwise important studies ‘have yet to fully consider the complex practices involved in reading and discussing difference’ (284).¹ It is in the move beyond the isolated sociological category of gender and certain sitespecific or geographically bounded locations that Reading Across Worlds aims to extend (build upon, rather than reject) existing research on readers. By seeking out reading’s largely unexplored relations with migration, multiculture and cultural difference, this study pursues what Aamir Mufti has called a ‘reconceptualisation of reception appropriate to the cultural realities of the present global conjuncture’ (Mufti, 1994: 309).

Reflecting upon the unprecedented rise of book groups in 2002, the British author and critic Margaret Forster asks: ‘[w]hy, in the last decade of the twentieth century, this explosion of interest in forming groups with reading as its object?’ (Hartley, 2002: viii). One answer to her (rhetorical) question lies with contemporary experiences of globalisation and mobility. Writing about the intensification of global exchange, circulation and consumption during the same decade, Arjun Appadurai argues that the planetary span of high-speed satellite technologies and the increasingly significant links between audiences, electronic mediation and migration means that ‘both viewers and images are in simultaneous circulation. Neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces’ (1996: 4).² Book groups too are mass-mediated formations that evolve through television and the internet as well as physical sites such as libraries and neighbourhoods. Even when these groups remain stubbornly focused on the book as a physical object, they are never entirely cut off from the world, always entangled within wider transnational networks of production and consumption.³ We will encounter in what follows otherwise isolated readers in various parts of the world evoking the same international news stories (e.g. on 9/11 or global terrorism) and media accounts of the global literary marketplace (e.g. the biographies of ‘star’ authors and high-profile novels). Our readers repeatedly draw upon blogs and online reviews in making sense of the printed page. In Canada, readers look at pictures of Brick Lane (the location) on a laptop before discussing Monica Ali’s novel. In Nigeria they draw upon online journalism from across the globe, citing the Mail on Sunday’s online blog on Brick Lane. A mobile phone rings so incessantly during one book group session in New Delhi that its owner feels obliged to take the call. As the reader begins to hold his own private conversation in the midst of his fellow readers, other group members start to poke fun at their distracted friend. Ironically, the group is part way through a discussion of Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), a satirical novel about new technologies, globalisation and their negative impact on locations like India, and upon social etiquette and public culture more generally. The readers’ taunts, which build on the group’s earlier discussions of the novel in relation to how computers, mobile phones and other ‘gizmos’ have rendered Americans ‘anti-social’, include: ‘now, nobody is coming to my house who’s talking on the phone every day’; ‘using mobile phones means your facial expressions become redundant’; ‘I’m just looking at a case scenario when everything is substituted by the mobile phone’ and ‘let’s talk about Leela Zahir now’. Leela Zahir is a key character in Transmission, and no randomly chosen reference point here: a famous Bollywood actor, Leela is also the name of a computer virus whose transmission disrupts ‘mobile telephony, airline reservations, transatlantic email traffic, and automated teller machines worldwide’ (Kunzru, 2004: 272).⁴

Clearly these readers are not ‘locals’ in any hermetically sealed sense of that term. They may occupy the same country, city, neighbourhood or street. They may be dependent upon vicinity in order to gather as a group. But they are also networked, not simply part of a closed circle of consumption. However, to accept Appadurai’s broader point that we live increasingly in a world where ‘moving images meet deterritorialised viewers’ (1996: 4), we do not have to assume we are all global audiences in the same way or to the same extent.⁵ This would be to foreclose important questions about the uneven, unequal relations between reading, globalisation and mobility: the patchy picture of global literacy for instance or the difference between movement as choice and compulsion. It would be to neglect the extent to which locale, region and nation persist as profound sites of interpretive investment for readers throughout the world, despite, and perhaps because of, the increased fragility of those sites. It would be to neglect responses to high-profile metropolitan novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) which reveal ‘divergences between various sorts of text, various protocols of reading and various constituencies of readers’ (Fraser, 2008: 163). Finally, it would be to neglect existing research on readers which suggests reading itself needs to be understood as a situated rather than a straightforwardly transhistorical or translocational act (Chartier, 1992).

What the image of the deterritorialised audience arguably distracts us from is the specificity of reading acts, their precise location within specific social, institutional, discursive and geographical settings. In the chapters that follow we pursue these various settings in greater detail, examining the extent to which seemingly spontaneous reading acts are produced within and through ‘regimes of value’ (Frow, 1995) relating to the protocols of lay and professional reading (Chapter 2), reader location and regionality (Chapter 3), the literary and extra-literary codes of ‘realism’ and the realistic (Chapter 4), the global literary marketplace (Chapter 5), and of contemporary media discourses around race, multiculturalism and assimilation (Chapter 6).

Since the late 1990s, book groups have been harnessed increasingly for large-scale mass read events in North America, Australia and Europe, often with the stated intention of embracing the challenges posed by migration and multiculture. As Anouk Lang (2008) observes with regard to the influential ‘One Book, One Community’ model, mass read events present collective reading as a means of achieving ‘social cohesion’ through the recognition of cultural diversity, a fact that is typically reinforced through a ‘choice of texts dealing with cultural and ethnic “others” ’. In 2008, the year in which many of our own groups met, New York selected Things Fall Apart as its ‘One Book’ choice; ‘The Common Book Project’ (Newcastle, UK) chose Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), Oregon’s ‘Everybody Reads’ selected Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (2007) while ‘One Book, One Vancouver’ chose Karen X. Tulchinsky’s tale of Jewish immigrants to Toronto in the 1930s, The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky (2003). These various events were inspired by longer-standing annual reading projects such as ‘Seattle Reads’ (1998–present) and ‘One Book, One Chicago’ (2001–present), whose back catalogue of selections tells a strikingly similar story. ‘Seattle Reads’ ’ previous choices include Julia Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine (2002), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2004–2005) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), while ‘One Book, One Chicago’ includes Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), works by Toni Morrison, Night (1960) by the Jewish holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994).

Despite the forms of globe-trotting exhibited in mass read event book choices, these relatively new reading networks are by no means necessarily democratising and, as we will see in Chapter 5, may well exaggerate the structural inequalities of the global literary marketplace in seeking commercial alignments between book groups and a select range of cosmopolitan authors. Publishers have sought increasingly to capitalise upon the apparent ‘taste’ among book groups for such writers, providing them with study guides, ready-made questions and discussion points, author interviews and even specific book group editions of certain works. Critics like Devlin-Glass (2001) have noted how book group selections often display a discernible taste for ‘books dealing with what the academy might term multicultural or “orientalising” fiction’ (577–578). Meanwhile, Fuller and Rehberg Sedo (2013) have explored how mass reading events and the rise of organised book group cultures are on one level an extension of conservative thinking and neoliberal hegemony that envelops the value and role of culture.

Yet while the account that follows is by no means a celebration or defence of book group culture, it maintains that to dismiss or simply worry over their reading habits represents an inadequate form of critique. For one thing it reproduces dubious historical and ultimately elitist hierarchies around taste and fears surrounding mass readership. As David Wright (2006) reminds us:

[a] concern with reading [ . . . ] can be conceptualized not simply as a concern with whether or not people read at all but also, if they do read, whether the types of reading they are engaged in are ‘correct’ or somehow wasteful or corrosive. Social and historical accounts of the history of reading in the UK and the US [ . . . ] have demonstrated the ways in which mass readership itself, rather than its lack, has been the more prevalent social and to some extent policy problem of recent centuries.

(125)

As one of the largest identifiable audiences outside the academy for the literary texts considered in this book (see below for full details) reading groups demand to be taken seriously.

Book groups now ‘constitute one of the largest bodies of community participation in the arts’ (Poole, 2003). Griswold et al. (2011) collate information from various studies estimating that there are 500,000 book groups in the United States, 50,000 in the UK and around 40,000 in Canada.⁶ Outside North America and Europe the statistics are far less clear, but it would be a mistake to assume that book groups are merely a ‘First World’ phenomenon. For example at the time of writing, the Bangalore Book Club in India, which was founded in 2006, has involved over 1,556 readers over 130 different meetings (http://www.BangaloreBookClub.com/), while the Delhi Book Lovers Club currently has 900 followers (https://twitter.com/DelhiBookLovers). Reading groups have played a notable historical role in former colonies such as the Caribbean, West Africa and in Australia where such formations date back to the 1820s: New South Wales had at least 150 clubs by the 1890s (Pierce, 2009: 44).⁷ Today, the internet and related media increasingly provide the possibility (if, as we shall see, not always the reality) of cross-cultural connections among readers and groups (i.e. www.encompassculture.com; www.ReadersCircle.org).⁸

Reading Across Worlds is based on 3,400 pages of transcribed book group conversation recorded in Africa (Kano and Lagos), India (New Delhi), the Caribbean (Port of Spain and Kingston), England (from Penzance to Liverpool), Scotland (Glasgow and Edinburgh) and Canada (Kingston, Ontario) over a period of three years.⁹ A qualitative analysis of readers in 30 different book groups scattered across four continents, this is a book that seeks to better understand how a particular kind of transnational audience roams or resituates itself through acts of reading. However, the book attempts nothing like systematic geographical coverage. Our core network of readers initially comprised five public library groups based in Central Scotland along with a further five groups recruited through the British Council’s international offices and overseas co-ordinators, giving us access to book groups based in Nigeria, the Caribbean, Morocco, Canada and India.¹⁰ We worked with each of these groups for a six-month period, recording and then transcribing their monthly book discussions.¹¹ During the data collection phase of the project (2006–2008) we supplemented these recordings through 11 further ‘one-off’ book group meetings, drawing upon library and home-based groups across mainland Britain, and in one case, Jamaica. Finally, we worked with national and international mass reading initiatives, namely ‘Small Island Read 2007’ and events tied to the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart in 2008. These independent public events gave us access to further book groups based in England, Scotland and Nigeria.

It will be evident from this summary that while the present study is relatively wide-ranging in terms of the locations it covers, it is by no means a comprehensive account of ‘world’ reading. Major sites of book group culture are not covered at all by this project, including Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Of the groups that were involved, all were Anglophone, and none could be said to be ‘representative’ of the regions from which they read, nor will they be read as such in what follows.

The range of our readers’ backgrounds varied widely, making it difficult to generalise about the book groups along the established lines of class, gender and ethnicity. The majority of our groups were of mixed gender, but overall women comprised approximately 70 per cent of the 250 readers taking part. They included readers aged from their early twenties through to their eighties. They included the unemployed, the retired, readers in post-secondary education as well as full-time and part-time workers. They included participants who had not picked up a book in years, such as some members of the mass read events participating on a one-off basis. At the other extreme, they included habitual readers on the cusp of what we have termed in this study ‘professional readers’, including some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Key
• Notes on Book Groups
• About the Authors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Professional and Lay Readers
• 3. Remote Reading
• 4. Reading and Realism
• 5. Reading in the Literary Marketplace
• 6. Reading as a Social Practice: Race Talk
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index