might be said to ‘tick boxes’ to secure financial support from sponsors
with a public commitment to corporate multiculturalism, and/or to
demonstrate that the money has been ‘well spent’.1'' From this perspective,
the photographic images of Small Island as a meeting place of cultural
diversity operate as ‘proof’ of an easily achieved and celebratory
multiculturalism, and as a visual shorthand that conceals the challenges
and contingencies of actually-existing ‘multiculture’. In After Empire, Paul
Gilroy uses the term ‘multiculture’, as opposed to multiculturalism, to
describe the kind of spontaneous, precarious, and provisional cross-
cultural interactions he sees emerging in contemporary British culture.18
Multiculture is not something that can be sanctioned or prescribed from
above. Instead Gilroy conceptualizes it as erupting erratically in the
vernacular formations of everyday life. If the actual readers of Small Island
cannot be said to read entirely outside the more programmatic logic of
the event’s official rhetoric (a logic which suggests reading Small Island
necessarily achieves ‘diversity’), they offer a more complex picture of
cultural reception (as both hermeneutics and hospitality’) that is arguably
closer to multiculttire than multiculturalism.
Meeting-places: reading Small Island together
While some of the readers we worked with found the multi-voiced
narrative of Small Island difficult to follow and an obstacle to their initial
engagement with the text, many were pulled into the plot and the world
ot Lew’s novel through the characters of Queenie, Bernard, Gilbert and
Hortense. Identification with these fictional figures, or lack of it, makes up
a substantial part of the talk on and around Small Island that we have
analysed so far. As one white reader noted of the novel during a focus
group discussion in Liverpool:
It just adds to the actual history doesn’t it, you know to to read from a human
perspective I suppose ... It adds humanity, it adds urn — you know you, you can read
about things and say,‘Oh that’s so awful’ ... and it, and it, or something, you know —
but to actually read from a — about things from a human perspective, of a character
that’s been created, then I think you can be, well, truly moved, in a way that just
reading about the history — and it can be when you read about the history as well but
It just adds that extra humanity.19
This reader reminds us of the extent to which the individual voices of
the novel serve to profoundly personalize the historical narrative in ways
that encourage readerly identification. (Perhaps the centrality of character
in Small Island is one reason for the novel’s popularity with book groups
and other non-academic readers.) On one level, the connection between
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the novel and‘history’ seems to reiterate the framing of the novel for the
Small Island Read event, which contextualized Small Island in terms of the
history of British slavery and postwar immigration. However, this reader
also suggests that engaging with Levy’s fictional work involves more than
just reading about the history’ with its dispassionate or merely gestural
empathy:‘Oh that’s so awful.’Reading Small L7<iHiLas-fιctιon, this reader
suggests, has the capacity to elicit a personal and human response, to be
‘truly moved’. If such an emotive account might be said to mystify the
actual identity-work, being done through the act of reading, it also
captures the more elusive, less accountable, and programmatic perspectives
that have emerged in the recorded conversations around Small Island.
Below is a conversation between a group of women readers, also based
in Liverpool, as they reflect approvingly upon the ‘realistic’ and ‘detailed’
descriptions of Queenie and Hortense. In common with women’s book
groups featured in other scholarly studies, these readers privilege a
mimetic reading practice in order to find points Ofidentification wild)
fictional characters, and with their own lives.20 As their discussion
proceeds, these women admire Hortense’s self-presentation as a
respectable, educated woman who, at first, does not appear to notice the
everyday racism that she encounters in 1940s London. Within their
analysis of Hortense’s attitudes and behaviour, class is foregrounded until
one reader suggests how the experience of migration might produce
disappointment in a newly arrived immigrant through the disillusion of
expectations and desires that have been founded on (colonialist?)
stereotypes of the receiving culture:
S4 She’s aspiring to better things isn't she? She hasn’t really got anything to be that
way about but she’s aspiring to live a better life arid have better things isn’t she?
Sl She’s very judgemental though isn’t she? Everybody else you know does
everything wrong
S2 I think I might be like her if I went to live there somewhere in Africa and I’ve
got my idea OfAfricans busy eating mangos in the sunshine (laughter)2
In their efforts to make sense of Hortense’s actions and opinions, these
readers move towards a creative re-reading of the text, imagining
themselves into an analogous situation where cultural and racial difference
is handled through stereotypes, while remaining sensitive to their material
effects. (Elsewhere they discuss Hortense coming up against
institutionalized racism, for instance.) It is not easy to ‘read off’ from this
conversation a positive encounter between (white, Liverpudlian) reader
and (West Indian) character, assuming we could know what such an
encounter might look like. For example, there is no obvious attempt by
moving worlds 9.2 3 3