members,12 Given their typical demographics, the political limits of
contemporary book groups as sites of ideological transformation might
seem glaringly obvious. The shared reading of Small Island in book groups
offers no guarantees that any kind of transformative meeting will occur.
Nevertheless, book group readers together constitute a large and all too
easily neglected interpretive community for Levy’s text.We believe that
ignoring this reading community would itself be a politically irresponsible
act. In what follows, we offer a critique of the Small Island Read event by
approaching it from two perspectives: first, in terms of how the groups
were depicted in official documents and statements (that is, in
methodological terms), we investigate Small Island Read from ‘above’ and
from the standpoint of its organizing agencies; and, second, we consider
how actual readers on the ground responded to the text in group
conversations and interviews.
Small Island Read: rhetoric and representation
Small Island Read 2007 was the largest mass-reading event ever held in the
UK. Running from U January to 31 March 2007, it involved the
distribution of 50,000 free copies of Andrea Levy’s novel, along with
80,000 copies of a glossy A5 readers’ guide. It generated 100 separate
events (including library talks, book group discussions, competitions,
exhibitions), and 60 school workshops. Drawing on earlier mass-reading
initiatives in Liverpool and Bristol, and integrating Glasgow and Hull as
new partner cities, the event was centred around, but moved beyond, four
locations with clear links to the slave trade.13 The declared aims of the
event were as follows:
• To develop sta ndards of literacy through the promotion of reading.
• Tb stimulate new forms of creativity inspired by the reading experience.
• To use reading to facilitate learning about the past.
• To bring diverse communities together through the act of reading and thereby foster
a sense of shared identity.1’1
Within this official agenda, the book is asked to operate as a hinge
between ‘the past’ (slavery and its abolition; postwar immigration) and the
present (contemporary multicultural diversity). As the funders articulated
it in a joint statement: ‘Remembering the victims of the slave trade is
essential in everyone’s lives. Just as important is celebrating the diversity
of the modern city.’13 Second, and more precisely, it is the reader and‘the
act of reading’ Small Island that is envisaged as a kind of pull string, capable
ofdraw’mg diverse reading communities together and Toster[ing] a shared
identity’.
This goal ofhistorical and communal cohesion is perhaps most dearly
30 Region / Writing / Home
and coherently embodied in the visual archive housed on the Small Island
Read 2007 website, where dozens of photographs depicting assembled
readers serve to perform and stage the act of reading the novel.16 The
collected subjects holding or surrounding copies of the book appear to
personify the diversity and multiculturalism which the sponsors of the
mass-reading event would like Smtdl Island to perform. The book as a
material artefact comes to represent a physical meeting place, drawing
communities of difference together. Most notable here is the exclusive
emphasis on the depiction Ofinclusiveness and diversity with reference to
ethnicity but also through the combination and juxtaposition of different
classes, generations, and sexes. Glaswegian bus drivers are depicted
brandishing free paperback editions of Small Island alongside a photograph
of uniformed schoolgirls with copies of the same text. Collectively these
images concretize the slogan adopted by many of the community-based
reading programmes involved in the project:‘reading as social glue’.
To what extent are these images and the rhetoric undermined or
contradicted by the event itself? The evaluation report tells us that the
majority of readers were middle class, 72 per cent were female, 91 per
cent white.There is nothing particularly surprising about this. Indeed, the
notable homogeneity of tire reading group as an Anglo-American social
formation means that these statistics point to a relative diversity. Certainly
there was a concerted and laudable effort on the part of the event
organizers to bring together different participants. Among the events
programmed for Small Island Read/ ‘Liverpool Reads’, for example, were
a reading group at the Caribbean community centre; a creative writing
project with young Somalis; a reading group at the Asylnm Link; a Youth
Project run by refugee artists, and a drama project with young people
from the Yemeni Arabic Communityt Nevertheless, these initiatives were
fraught with problems and ultimately' highlighted some of the limitations
of the mass-read project as a community-wide activity, They include the
difficulties involved in providing sufficient numbers of English for
Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) support workers; the non-
availability of Small Island in languages other than English; issues of
illiteracy among some groups within the city, and racist remarks in reading
group discussions, which threatened the possibility of cross-racial reading
groups.
In this context, events like Small Island Read provide a glimpse of the
limitations of state-sanctioned multiculturalism. The main national
sponsors of Small Island Read were Arts Council Englandand the Heritage
Lottery Fund.Viewed sceptically, the images and rhetoric outlined above
moving worlds 9.1