“What Kind of Reader are You?”. Practices and Spaces of Public Reading in Colombia, 1910-1944

Abstract

Objective: To analyze the spaces, material supports, and practices of public reading in Colombia in the first half of the 20th century. As an analytical perspective, we propose to broaden the scope of interpretation of reading processes and the configuration of public opinion to include other scenarios in which the relationship between print media and urban planning contributed to guiding reading practices in public spaces. Methodology: Based on a review of newspapers, chronicles, and archival material, we identified the various reading spaces, agents involved, practices, and diverse uses generated by street reading. These elements allow us to identify the different subjects and practices generated in everyday spaces of public life. Originality: From the perspective of “everyday reading”, the article puts into tension the analytical perspectives that confine the study of reading practices to literacy processes and institutional and formal places of circulation of readers and explores the way in which public reading, in the first half of the 20th century in Colombia configured a broad scenario of the reading experience that destabilizes a series of distinctions at the base of the historiographical analysis on the subject: institutional spaces vs. everyday spaces, public reading practices vs. intimate or private reading practices, literate vs. illiterate, and even more traditional material supports such as the book vs. small sheets or ephemeral media that were a fundamental part of the modes of production and circulation of print media in this period. Conclusions: This reveals other scenarios, practices, and subjects that intervene in the process of public reading, with which we hope to reconsider the hierarchy between various practices, spaces, and print media.