The name is absent



becomes safe for two women to talk about painful memories because
they have been prompted by incidents in the novel.The respectful turn-
taking within this group and the ‘I hear what you’re saying’ type of
comments which members offered in response to personal stories,
demonstrate how, within a book group context, the reading of fiction
that explores under-represented experiences and aspects of history can
enable the validation of other types of silenced histories within readers’
own lives. Differences of class and economic circumstances among group
members become articulated and understood through storytelling. Thus,
in some cases, Levy’s text offers a meeting-place within which readers
can elaborate their own subjectivity alongside or even against the grain
of the characters represented in the novel.

As our analysis in th e second part of this essay suggests, actual readers
of Levy’s novel use their discussions of the book to establish various types
of connection or ‘meeting’. These range from the material, face-to-face
encounters of the book group itself, to ephemeral moments of inter-
generational or cross-cultural connection. For some readers, sharing and
re-reading
Smiill Island with others enables a critical examination of
British imperialism and its contemporary legacies.This appears to be the
type of cross-cultural and multicultural work that the sponsors and
organizers of
Small Island Read hoped that the mass-read would perform.
However, the dialogic and reflexive processes which lead readers to
produce these instances of critique accord more with Gilroy’s notion of
‘multiculture’ as a series of eruptions that occur only to dissipate within
everyday life. The provisionalιty of ‘multiculture’ and its vernacular
formation is mirrored, or rather refracted, in the fleeting and sometimes
ambiguous nature of the instances within which readers recognize the
textual ‘Other’, or make connections between institutionally reinforced
inequities of gender and ‘race’. Rather than producing the ‘social glue’
that reconnects the citizens of divided cities, then, the mass-read of
Small
Island
creates something more akin to fragile threads among those who
choose to participate.

Nevertheless, reading Small Island together, a project facilitated by the
Small Island Read 2007 programme, offers the potential for meeting-places
to be imagined and even actualized. Jenny Hartley has noted that book
groups offer ‘a forum for a level of debate and conversation not easily
found elsewhere’ in contemporary society', even if the outcomes of these
conversations cannot be guaranteed.30 In this context, we remain caught
between the opening epigraphs of our essay. If
Small Island, mobilized as
it was by the mass-read event, potentially fosters linkages and connections

38


Region I Writing / Home
across cultures, it does not necessarily serve as a bridge, crossover or
meeting-point between them.

NOTES

1. ‘Beyond die Book’participant focus group (3) Liverpool, 19 February 2007. In tins
essay, quotations are taken from interview transcripts.Verbatim transcription practices
have been followed by both research teams. However, ‘Beyond the Book' received
permission to use the first and, in some cases, family names of research participants,
while ‘Devolving Diasporas’ have designated speakers Sl, S2, etc., except where it
became impossible to assign speech to a particular speaker, hence S* is employed. For
reasons Ofconfideiitiality' and data protection, none of these transcripts is in the public
domain.

2. ‘Beyond the Book’ interview with Beccy Jones, Bluecoat Arts Centre, Liverpool, 21
February 2007.

3. Both of these projects investigate, with different emphases, contemporary cultures of
reading, locally and globally.‘Beyond the Book’ is a collaborative project investigating
mass-reading events in the UK, USA, and Canada, which was funded by the AHKC
2005-8. A multi-disciplinary team employed mixed methods, including on-line
surveys, focus groups with readers, interviews with event organizers, and participation-
observation of events in order to investigate shared reading as a social practice and to
examine the power relations among the various agents involved in selected
community-, region- and nation-wide reading events.

See <http://www.beyondthebookproject.org> ‘Devolving Diasporas’ is a three-year
AHRC funded project exploring, the relationship between reading, migration, and
location by recording and analysing book group discussions across the UK and in
specific locations in India, Canada, the Caribbean, and Africa.

See <http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com/>

4. Statistics and demographics cited by Liverpool City Council at:

<http:/7www.liverpoo].gov.uk/News/Facts_and_figures/index.asp> accessed 2.2
April 2009.

5. James Procter, Writing Black Britain 'I948-1998 (Manchester: Manchester LIP, 2000),
p. 3.

6. ’The Reader’ organization acts as an umbrella for several reading-centred projects,
including‘Liverpool Reads’and the award-winning'Get Into Reading'programme
which has worked with more than 80 groups of people in the Wirral and Liverpool
to date.These groups include recovering addicts, young LGBT people, seniors, people
with mental health challenges, new immigrants and asylum seekers.

For ‘ Fhe Reader’, see: <http://thereader.org.uk/>

For ‘Get Into Reading’, see: <http://reachingout.thereader.org.uk/>.

7. See, for example, Bea Colley, the ‘Liverpool Reads’ co-ordinator cited in 'Movie
Writer Leads Book Campaign’, 25 September 2005 at

<http://news.bbc.co.Uk/l/hi/england/merseyside/4280592.stni> accessed 23 April
2009.

8. For a critical analysis of how British publishers constructed the contemporary genre
of the ‘crossover book’, see Claire Squires,
Marketing Literature: The Making ι>∕
Caiiteiiipirrary Writing in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 147-75.

9. To maintain the connection with schools and children in the CityTLiverpool Reads’
promoted two texts for younger readers alongside
Sniall Island: Benjamin Zephaniah’s

moving worlds 9.1                                              39



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