See also:

Small Grants
Networks and Workshops
Large Grants

 

DEVOLVING DIASPORAS: RECEPTION AND MIGRATION IN CENTRAL SCOTLAND, 1980 - PRESENT
Dr James Procter
Co-Investigators: Dr Bethan Benwell, Dr Gemma Robinson, Dr Jackie Kay

FINDINGS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

• This project investigates the relationship between reception, location and migration. By co-ordinating a series of reading group discussions across the UK (from Penzance to Glasgow) and in Africa (Lagos, Kano, Tetuan), the Caribbean (Port of Spain, Kingston), India (New Delhi), and Canada (Toronto), this project has worked to increase understanding of how different interpretive communities make sense of the same works of diasporic literature. Central Scotland formed the hub for this transnational network, which we have used to move outwards, or devolve, from the dominant centres of metropolitan consumption and reception often associated with cosmopolitan migrant writing (e.g. London and New York).

• Reception study provides a productive methodology for this project because it is fundamentally resistant to the idea that meaning resides in one place. Through the transcription and careful analysis of the conversations produced by our groups, we have asked new questions about how different audiences make alternative (and overlapping) narratives from the same text, and about how we might account for such variations in the production of meaning. In other words, the book groups have allowed us to move outwards (and again, 'devolve') from a text-centred approach to diasporic literature by exploring the constitutive role of the act of reading.

• Working with public libraries, the British Council, mass read events, and home-based book groups throughout 2007 and 2008, our project involved 30 groups, amounting to over 3397 pages of transcription. Our readers covered a range of texts, including modern classics (eg Things Fall Apart) and mainstream works (eg Small Island), 'local' Scottish (eg Suhayl Saadi and Jackie Kay) and proto-canonical metropolitan writers (eg Monica Ali and Zadie Smith), novels and poetry. In turn, our reading constituencies were comprised of both 'diasporic' and 'host', metropolitan and non-metropolitan readers. The project was supported by a number of publishers, as well as by the Achebe Foundation. The AHRC's Moving Manchester project (2006-2010) shared similar concerns to our project in terms of working to document and analyse the diasporic contribution of a particular region. Our two projects worked closely together between 2007-2010 to share methodologies and findings, and to foreground each other's work. Their team spoke at our workshops and conference, and we in turn were invited to speak at their main 'Glocal Imaginaries' conference in September 2009. The AHRC's Beyond the Book project (2005-2008, Birmingham University) shared our interest in cultures of reading, focusing on mass read events in the UK, USA and Canada. We delivered papers at each other's conferences, and attended a research consortium at Lancaster to share findings. The project steering committee included librarians and public sector workers in the arts.

• In addition to providing us with the raw material for a sustained, comparative study of diasporic reception, the reading groups allowed us to promote the presence of a 'devolved' diasporic literature in Central Scotland. Exploring diaspora texts in terms of local reception contexts raises questions around the hierarchies of reading that govern canon formation, encouraging the exploration of an alternative archive of diasporic production, beyond London, by South Asian, African and Caribbean communities.

• Through all of the activities outlined above, this project has drawn upon and addressed itself to the diasporic communities of Central Scotland and to those who live alongside them. By carefully locating these communities within a wider network of readers in North America, Africa, India and the Caribbean, we have illuminated more than just 'local' interpretations of a global formation, we have produced the first transnational study of the actual audiences of diasporic literature.

• Jackie Kay (MBE) is one of the UK's best known poets, and one of her main roles was to raise the project profile beyond the academy. As our unofficial ambassador, Kay staged poetry performances, was a judge for our poetry competition, and engaged actors and audience in a broader discussion during the stage-adaptation of her poems. Her presence at this last event was followed by the BBC who at that time were making a documentary of her childhood (The House I Grew Up In, Radio 4). Jackie's presence helped us engage a much wider non-academic audience than we could have otherwise achieved, from the several hundred school children who submitted their poems for the competition, to the many book group members who specifically requested a reading from her.

• A key achievement of the project in this context has been a more nuanced understanding of what was previously an undifferentiated, and dislocated 'audience'. While our findings ultimately challenge the simple reduction of readers to particular locations, they also evoke a series of distinct inter-textual circuits,that typically gravitate towards the location of the readers.

• A central achievement of the project has been the production of Out of Bounds, an anthology of poems by black and British Asian writers for one of the UK's leading poetry publishers. Containing 250 poems (from a longlist of 600), the work in this volume ranges from Aberdeen to the Isle of Wight and includes substantial sections on Scotland, the North, Midlands and Wales. The project has tackled these same aims through the production of a substantial database documenting the diaspora arts in Scotland since 1980, and housing 619 entries.

• A key achievement of the project which was not originally anticipated, was tripling the number of groups we worked with from 10 in the original application, to 30. In Britain we moved beyond Central Scotland (the original boundary for our UK research) to include groups in St Ives, Penzance, Bristol, Hull, Manchester, London, Nottingham, Bedminster, Chepstow and Norfolk. Beyond Britain we extended our reading groups to include additional sites in Nigeria and Jamaica. This provided an insight into different kinds of group: library-based (our sole focus originally), home-based, and mass read event groups. There have been clear intellectual gains from this further work, which provided the project with a more robust body of data to work with, and a more compelling comparative case to offer.

• Our practice of focusing on neglected varieties of reading formations (e.g. partial readings, mass readings, not reading), and on emerging comparative fields of interest (eg interdisciplinary connections between Caribbean and Scottish Studies; complementary linguistic studies of reading and sociological reception studies) have already been recognised as original and extremely useful additions to their fields. The benefits of our collaborative research have been praised by reviewers for our New Formations article 'Not reading Brick Lane' as 'impressive', having 'a distinctive method and approach to books in terms of their cultural biographies'. Funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy was secured for further research on 'Caribbean-Scottish Passages'. Our linguistic research on empirical approaches to literary reception (eg Benwell's Language and Literature article) is a corrective to ethnographic studies that neglect engagement with the reader-text interface, and/or the conditions under which reception responses have been obtained.

• 'Devolving Diasporas' also organised several successful public events which worked to foster imaginative connections between Scotland and diaspora. For instance, in 2009, the project ran a national poetry competition for young people on the theme of belonging and national identity ('Whose Scotland?'). Attracting over 300 entries, the competition was won by 13-year-old Anju Gopalan of Edinburgh whose poem was published on the AHRC and Whose Scotland? web sites. The competition was enthusiastically received by local teachers.

• In 2007 the project ran a series of youth theatre workshops in collaboration with the MacRobert Theatre. These workshops culminated in a 3-night stage adaptation of Jackie's Kay's The Adoption Papers. Attended by local book group readers involved in the project, along with Kay and her adoptive parents, the production sold out for the 3 nights and was taken to the Edinburgh Festival (Aug 6-9 2008). The competition and stage adaptation were reported in Big Issue (June 2007), and in the local media, including the Evening News, Edinburgh's City of Literature web pages, and the Stirling Observer.

• There has been no previous attempt to gather evidence of reading within our field and the project's book-length study, The Odyssean Audience, provides the first ever glimpse of how acts of reading and meaning production might actually occur on the ground.

• In the closing months of the project, and on the basis of our research on the Devolving Diasporas project, Procter was invited to join an international research team working on a project called 'Globalized Cultural Markets: The Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference'. The project was awarded 50,000 euros by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, which will fund a series of seminars and meetings between the team, and will be an opportunity to advance some of the findings from Devolving Diasporas. The same research team is currently preparing a bid through the European 7FP Capacities programme in order to extend this project. Procter is asked to speak regularly on the project theme at universities across the UK and internationally.

• Reading After Empire Conference (2008) focused on the central but neglected role of audiences (readers, viewers and listeners) in colonial, postcolonial and diasporic contexts. Attended by over 80 delegates from around the world, it generated a wide range of papers on readers and reading acts in India, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and US. Speakers contributed both empirical and theoretical accounts using reading in a variety of senses: as consumption, as hermeneutics, as exoticism, as translation.

• During the course of the project we held several workshops in 2006, 2007 and 2010, to introduce and conclude the project. These informal events combined short presentations and open conversation in order to stimulate and inform our ongoing research. Speakers and audiences were a deliberate mix of academics and cultural workers outside the academy.

• Finally, we have so far completed five articles, in addition to several book chapters and a substantial co-edited book, Postcolonial Audiences (Routledge).

• Feedback received on the database suggests it is already playing a useful role beyond the academy. This database provides information about diasporic arts within Central Scotland from 1980 to the present day, cataloguing the work of writers and performers who have connections to South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Designed for researchers, general readers, students and teachers, it is an interactive resource on Scotland, the arts and diaspora. It includes information about prize-winning publications, pamphlets, cultural events, film and theatre productions in multicultural Scotland.

• The Devolving Diasporas website (http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com/index.htm) houses key findings from the project, notably the database, as well as a record of the project's main events, details of papers, publications and presentations etc. It also contains a 'featured writing' section, with selected contributions on diasporic Scotland, and a 'readers reply section' which documents how some of the readers themselves felt about taking part in the project. University of Newcastle has agreed to fund this website until at least 2016.

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