Reading as ‘social glue’? Book Groups,
Multiculture, and the Small Island Read 2007

DANIELLE FULLER & JAMES PROCTER

Well, it’s [Small Island] linking people who come here isn’t it, it’s their history isn’t it,
their personal history. So it’s - we’ve all got connections to other cultures, particularly
in this city [Liverpool], and it’s like a bridge. (LindadLiverpool Reads’ participant)¹

Urn,‘social glue’ I think was the word that we, we came up with, the words that we
came up with, that we thought it was a, a kind of social glue. And the difficulty with
Small Island was, because it's not, umnι, necessarily a crossover book. (Beccy Jones,
Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool) ²

In 2007 Andrea Lew’s award-winning novel, Small Island (2004), was
selected for the UK’s largest-ever mass-reading event.What cultural work
was the novel assumed to perform by the organizers, sponsors, and
institutions associated with this event? Were they in tension with the ways
that actual rea<Jers responded to the novel? Can a fictional bestseller that
evokes the Windrush generation encourage contemporary readers to share,
or even resolve, not only their different perspectives on Small Island, but
also their perspectives on cultural difference? How should we understand
the relationship between a piece of internationally-acclaimed,
metropolitan fiction, and a local readership in the NorthWest of England?
Focusing on Liverpool,whιch was one of the four city sites of Small Island
Read 2007, our essay explores these questions by drawing on selected data
gathered from two large-scale collaborative research projects funded by
the AHRCfBeyond the Book’ and ‘Devolving DiasporasL³The material
we analyse includes official documents, press releases, and statements
issued by several agencies involved in the event.We also consider recorded
focus group and book group conversations with a variety of UK readers,
the majority of whom live in Liverpool.

Liverpool is a multiracial port city in which more than 6Û languages are
spoken. With a current population of 436,100, the city is home to
Europe’s longest-established Chinese community,⁴ but its ties with the
peoples of the African diaspora are even older because of the city’s
historical (and infamous) role within the transatlantic slave trade. As Linda
suggests in the opening quotation, many contemporary Liverpudlians

Region / Writing / Home
have historical, familial or social ‘connections’ to more than one cultural
community dwelling within the city limits. However, the multicultural
demographic of Liverpool is rarely signified within popular
representations of the city either within or outside the UK. For example,
the celebratory discourses of arrival and beginning, that are ritually
associated with the London-centred narrative of the SS Einpire IVindriisli
docking at Tilbury in June 1948 with its cargo of 492 West Indian
emigrants, consistently overshadow the race riots that took place in
Liverpool just two months Iater- AsJames Procter has argued elsewhere,
‘these disturbances, concerning the large numbers of black seamen who
had come to settle in the city during the war, signal the presence of
alternative beginnings and earlier arrivals.’⁶ At stake here is an elision that
is both historical and geographical: if, within the symbolic discourses ot
multiculturalism, London remains an emphatic epicentre, this partly
depends upon a recurring sense of the north and other regional settings
as being beyond migration and diaspora. Thus, Liverpool’s international
image has, until very recently, been primarily secured by the city’s
association with successful football clubs,The Beatles, and working-class
poverty. Such representations are never far away from national nostalgias
about local community, neighbourhood, and social solidarity invocations
of which often refer, either implicitly or explicitly, to homogenous ‘white’
populations.These kinds Ofcontradictions between Liverpool as at once
prior to the Windrush yet peripheral to diaspora, were, we shall see, played
out during Small Eland Reads 2007.

The Liverpool-based co-ordinators situated in ‘The Reader’ office had
previously organized two successful city-wide reading events of their own
(‘ Liverpool Reads’) and, because of their extensive work with socially
and economically marginalized groups, were fully aware of divisions
within their city Community⁶As BeccyJones notes in the epigraph above,
and as Jane Davis, founder of ‘The Reader’ organization, has often
remarked in press statements, the concept of a city-wide event favoured
by the ‘Liverpool Reads’ committee was underwritten by the idea of
shared reading as a type of‘social glue’.’This conceptualization implies a
desire to bring people across th e city of Liverpool together by off ering the
common ground of a single book, perhaps with the aim of healing those
social divisions. However, as we demonstrate m this essay, these well-
intentioned goals are at odds with some of the aims and. structures shaping
the Iarger-Scale Small Island Read project, and also with the logic of
dominant discourses of multiculturalism operating in the UK. For
instance, what kind of erasures and assumptions might be involved in

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