Jamaica Kincaidâs A Small Place (1988) depicts the authorâs childhood encounter with the history of slavery, and her awareness of Antigua as a place in the worldâas a place that has a particular relationship with the rest of the world. Kincaid insists that Antigua should understand its local identity as a former British colony battling a corrupt postcolonial government and the effects of an aggressively pursued tourism industry in order to operate more effectively in global contexts:
Grasping their place in the world, Kincaid suggests, would enable Antiguans to resist oppression and to demand justice. In the essay, it becomes clear that Kincaid is able to recognise Antiguaâs relationship with the rest of the world and to resist what is held to be common sense as a result of her reading practicesâan avid reader since childhood, she notices the economic and political significance of the Antiguan libraryâs resources and its later neglect and disrepair, which she perceives as deliberate, motivated to deter the Antiguan people from achieving in education and art since such knowledge is considered a route towards critical thinking about the administrative system. Importantly, the marker of the libraryâs dereliction is its location:might not knowing [âŠ] why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world? (Kincaid 1988, 56â7)
Moving the library to a less-prestigious, less-accessible, less-functional location is evidence of the libraryâs significance and the perceived threat of an educated population.Why is the old building that was damaged in the famous earthquake years ago [âŠ] not repaired and the library put back in the place where it used to be? Or, why, years after The Earthquake damaged the old library building, has a new library not been built? [âŠ] if you saw the old library, situated as it was, in a big, old wooden building [âŠ] with its wide veranda, its big, always open windows, its rows and rows of shelves filled with books, its beautiful wooden tables and chairs for sitting and reading [âŠ] you would see why my heart would break at the dung heap that now passes for a library in Antigua. The place where the library is now, above the dry-goods store, in the old run-down concrete building, is too small to hold all the books from the old building. (Kincaid 1988, 41â3)
Kincaidâs essay articulates a common preoccupation in postcolonial literatures and cultures worldwide, where books and reading take a central place and are of vital importance to the shape of postcolonial society and economies. Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading began as a project to find out why postcolonial literature contains so many moments of reading, or instances of doing other things with booksâholding them above to shelter from the rain, glancing at books unread on the bedside table, making use of their pages for writing materials, or when toilet paper is scarce. In postcolonial writing, such instances are more consistently found, and are more prevalent, than is generally the case. In an effort to understand why that is, Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading analyses local literary communities by placing texts in their local literary marketplaces. I consider how texts are circulated through local publishing, bookselling, education, and events, in an effort to understand the place of reading in its location and to enable an analysis of market forces that inform the form and function of literature and reading in each context. Through this process, combined with close textual analysis of instances of reading in literary texts, this book asks, in four chapters, what reading means in its local literary marketplace. It asserts, through a comparative conclusion, the need to undertake located readingâthat is, to read with an understanding of local economic, political, and, relatedly, cultural factorsâin order to perceive the impact and function of books and reading. The specific offers lessons for reinterpreting books and reading elsewhere, and for acknowledging their centrality to all aspects of collective and individual agency.
The significance of books and reading has been acknowledged in a number of local contexts, including Black British magazine publishing:
This anonymously authored article asserting the centrality of books to the way populations understand, and operate within, the world was uncovered in an archive copy of Race Today from 1973, by Bethan Evans, a postgraduate researcher working on the Black British short story under my supervision at NTU. The magazineâs function was to elicit change in policies and practices in the UK, eradicating racism through effecting change in education, the media, and local and national politics. Despite its local focus, the sense of a globally connected influence through books and reading is implied by the reference to âleaders and those who would overthrowâ, this idea also accepting the necessity of revolution in some circumstances. In all postcolonial contexts books and reading take on further significance because they are often a vital method of overturning colonial attitudes about the location which were previously imposed through the circulation of colonial literature and other books, particularly in educational settings.It is impossible to over-estimate the influence that books have on the lives of us all. They inform us when we learn at school, as they inform teachers who teach us and the lecturers who taught them. They inform the journalists who prepare the television programmes we watch at night, or the newspaper we read in the morning. They are the reference source for politicians and pundits, for leaders and those who would overthrow. Between their covers are stored much of our knowledge, our culture and our very ways of thinking. (Race Today 1973, 301)
To date, Homi Bhabhaâs essay âSigns Taken for Wondersâ is the most prominent analysis of the appearance of the English book, the text, within colonial writing. Here, Bhabha argues that the appearance of literature âout of placeâ in colonial-period writing offers potential for undermining colonial power by strategic reading and misreading. Because of its prominence, there is merit in examining here the extent to which Bhabhaâs proposal might apply to the presence of books and instances of reading in postcolonial literature. Bhabhaâs essay offers close analysis of Marlowâs discovery in the wilderness of a shipping manual in Heart of Darkness , and the impact this has on the way he perceives his role in the colonial enterprise. I discuss Bhabha in some detail in this introductory chapter, in part to demonstrate that this argument only goes a very short distance towards accounting for the multiple and varied instances of reading found so frequently in postcolonial fiction. My response to Bhabhaâs argument also illustrates the timeliness of engaging with the material contexts surrounding bookselling, book marketing, and book production, in local literary contexts.
Homi Bhabhaâs assertion of what the book means in the colonised location rests on the claim that the book is an exceptional presence in the literary text, that it announces its strangeness. Conversely, my research reveals a high frequency of instances of books and reading in postcolonial literature from all locations. In each chapter, particularly meaningful or exemplary instances are analysed in detail, while these are contextualised within a discussion of patterns emerging in texts and locations. In total, approximately 200 literary texts have been analysed, mostly from the four locations explored in chapters in this book, in the process of arriving at a theory of located reading which helps to uncover what reading means and how the function of reading is determined by its location. My analysis reveals that books and reading perform far more complex functions than Bhabhaâs discussion would suggest, and that these functions are dependent on both the locationâs local literary marketplace and its particular relationship with colonialism. Partly for this reason, each location addressed here has a different kind of postcolonial context, beginning with two large former British colonies, each of which was the subject of border change: India is considered up to and at the moment of independence; Nigeria is examined from the years immediately preceding independence and until the present day; in the UK a postcolonial diaspora context is the subject of enquiry; and in Cuba the neocolonial impact of global tourism is the focus of the analysis of post-Revolution-period literature in this former Spanish colony which has also been under economic imperial control by the USA in the years between Spanish imperialism and Revolution.
When I first began working on this project, I had simply observed a pattern of highly significant moments in postcolonial literature which focused on books and reading, and had no set ideas about which locations might offer the most fruitful fields for analysis, nor yet whether a location-based structure was the best suited to the project. In an early discussion with professors Gregory Woods and David Worrall, I was made aware of the opportunity to engage undergraduate research assistants on paid summer research internships at NTU. This, combined with my hosting of further students undertaking research assistant posts as part of assessed work placement activities, enabled me to begin mapping the locations which manifested the most surprising, repeated, or frequent instances of reading. I worked with nineteen student research assistants, each of whom provided enthusiastic insight into the texts they read, some of which are discussed in this book, while other texts were excluded on the basis of the research assistantsâ analysis. While this method enabled me to move from an initial intention to address reading in postcolonial literature with an attempt at completeness to a much more logical position of reducing my scope to four specific regions, all of these temporary research assistants left the project with a new appreciation of postcolonial literature, of reading practices, and of the function of research in the academy.
Tsitsi Dangarembgaâs Nervous Conditions (1988) was one of the first novels that made me pause and reflect on reading as a strategy in postcolonial literature. It may be anticipated that the postcolonial novel of education would include references to reading, but in fact any predictable patterns in this category are not observable. In Annie John (1985); Nervous Conditions (1988); Crick Crack , Monkey (1970); and We Need New Names (2013), a young female protagonist responds to her colonial education with varying levels of ambivalence, ranging from passivity in NoViolet Bulawayoâs We Need New Names to outright rebellion when Nyasha tears up her school books with her teeth in Nervous Conditions.
Jamaica Kincaidâs coming-of-age novel Annie John , set in postcolonial Antigua, has been discussed primarily in response to the complex, physically close relationships between protagonist Annie and a series of girls and women, especially her mother (see Caton 1996; Murdoch 1990; Simmons 1998; Valens 2004). The mother-daughter relationship in particular is frequently discussed as an example of the way maternal roles are disturbed by the postcolonial condition. These female relationships are thoroughly dependent upon education, especially reading fiction and history at school, as well as reading library books, and also life-writing; a pivotal moment in Annieâs life occurs when she is ask...