prescribing a London-produced, metropolitan novel to a ‘local’
Liverpudlian readership despite that city’s own long and rich history of
postwar Caribbean and black British writing? In order to address this
question, our essay will make a distinction between the rhetoric of
Inulticulturalisin — as it is sanctioned at an official level, and was
reproduced in the publicity statements around Small Island Reads 2007 —
⅛nd Paul Gilroy’s notion of‘multiculture’, which describes informal,
Vernacular expressions of cross-cultural connection that are arguably
closer to the local readings ot Small Island considered in the final section
of the essay.
⅛ocal sites∕national structures: situating the tensions of Small
Island Reads
1Ve have quoted above Beccy Jones’s statement that Small Island was not
a ‘crossover book’. Given our concerns in this essay, it is tempting to
interpret her phrase as referring to a book’s capacity to appeal to different
cultural communities, thereby supplying the ‘social glue’ that might foster
stronger relationships among the city’s diverse groups. However, Jones,
who was part of the original ‘Liverpool Reads’ committee, is making a
more nuanced point which is that book selection is key to the programme
achieving any kind of connection among the city’s readers. She notes here
that the choice of an adult novel for the 2007 ‘Liverpool Reads’
represented a deviation from the programme’s preferred genre.‘Liverpool
Reads 2006’, tor example, focused upon Millions by the Liverpudlian
author, Frank Cotterell Boyce, a novel intended primarily for school-aged
children, but one which can also be enjoyed by adults.8 Millions is also
the only ‘Liverpool Reads’ selection to date to have been written by a
local writer, from which we can infer that celebrating Liverpool’s literary
talent is not necessarily an aim of the programme. This situation is,
however, typical of many‘One Book, One Community’ city-wide reading
initiatives in the UK and in NorthAmericaAVhile not all programmes
share Liverpool’s emphasis on involving schools and young people from
diverse communities, organizers frequently select books because they
articulate themes, issues, and ideas that are pertinent to the inhabitants of
a locale and, crucially, because they have the potential to appeal to male
and female readers across different age groups.9 Since ‘Liverpool Reads
2007’ was part of a Iarger-Scale programme — Small Island Read 2007 ~ the
selection ot Levy’s novel was not even made by the Liverpool organizers
but by Bristol Cultural Ihevelopment Partnership, the team who have
successfully run Bristol’s ‘Great Reading Adventure’ since 2003.
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Region / Writing / Home
Nevertheless, the choice of a mainstream, best-selling migrant narrative
with a Predorninantly London setting might seem odd, given that the
partner cities in Small Island Read were Bristol, Glasgow, Hull and
LiverpooLArguably, the choice reinforces an ideology that posits London
as the apotheosis of the culturally sophisti cated‘multicultural’ metropolis.
However, as we shall see below, many of the participating Liverpudlian
readers move with consummate and apparently untroubled ease between
local, metropolitan, and national landscapes in their accounts.
While the selection of Levy’s novel plays into discursive tensions about
the location Ofhnulticultural Britain’, further contradictions arise from the
ambiguous private∕public situation and political efficacy of another site
materialized by Small Island Read, namely, the book group. It the image
of the solitary reader has been historically dominant since medieval times,
the emergence of book groups during the nineteenth century suggests a
dramatic alternative to Comrnonsense notions of reading as a private,
individual, silent, and cognitive act.10 Moreover, the phenomenal success
of book groups in contemporary Britain, Ganada, and the USA indicates
that many readers pursue reading as a social, communal, public and
conversational activity. Even if they do not always result in a meeting of
minds, book groups involve a social gathering, a physical, face-to-face
encounter, or a virtual, online meeting that ensures no reader is an island.1 '
Book group discussion is typically intersectional, involving processes such
as cross-cultural identification, and the sharing of perspectives and
interpretations in a process that is both collaborative and dialogic.
Certainly, there is evidence m the groups we have worked with that book
discussions can create a meeting place for intergenerational understanding,
or construct an ideological common ground by articulating and reflecting
upon previously internalized values and attitudes about‘race’, class, and
gender. The identity work that readers undertake m the act of shared
reading can even involve making connections among these ‘categories’, as
well as interrogating how and why those categories have been formalized
through educational institutions, societal norms, economic structures and
the legacies of British imperial histories.
In other ways, however, the book group formation seems stubbornly
resistant to the kinds of cross-cultural meeting we might wish to associate
with progressive political action. Book groups tend to divide along the
lines of ethnicity and gender, if not generation, so that relatively
homogenous gatherings (for example, all-male and all-female groups)
predominate. Equally, there is evidence to suggest that book groups often
exert exclusionary practices, deterring or being suspicious of new
moving worids 9.2
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