Remote Reading

Abstract

In this chapter we consider how a group of fictions produced, and primarily set within London are mobilised by readers located outside the metropolis. How does reading remotely, whether from locations beyond the British nation or from the diverse regions of England and Scotland, play a part in the production of meaning and value? Literary critics have tended to proceed by focusing upon how local literatures at the periphery have been consumed, commodified and incorporated by the metropolitan centre.1 This chapter works in the opposite direction to ask how local and regional readers beyond the literary capital consume migrant metropolitan fiction: a body of literature that frequently mobilises tropes of marginality, dislocation and decentring, while unfolding from the centre. Tracking the reception of books like White Teeth, Brick Lane and Small Island across our geographically dispersed book groups, this chapter offers a rarely considered set of responses to writing whose critical reception has been overshadowed by the capital. What particularly interests us is the abiding imaginative investment of our readers in the particularities of place, region and territory, despite both the prevailing themes of these books and wider claims that globalisation ‘dissolves the barriers of distance’ (Robins, 1991: 25).2 If, as the cultural geographer Doreen Massey has argued, much recent work in ‘cultural studies and the arts’ has seen ‘a prioritisation of movement/flow above all else’ (2011: np), our readers’ discussions reveal an alternative set of priorities.