Notes from the margin: Understanding collective reading experience in St John's, Newfoundland

Abstract

Book clubs are a popular social phenomenon, yet they have been significantly understudied in academic research. By understanding the functions and uses of collective meaning-making through articulations of The Granny Bates Book Club members in St. John's, Newfoundland, this study seeks to illuminate how readers in diasporic communities discursively engage, specifically with children's literature, to negotiate subjective positionings in complex and contradictory ways. The provocative space of book club readership, marked by the comings and goings of diasporic islander identity, legitimizes the members' enjoyment and pleasure gained from reading children's fiction. It acts as a learning space in which members deliberately exchange historical knowledges, display aesthetic evaluations of text, negotiate social, economical, geographical, and regional struggles, as well resist/adhere to gender roles and expectations, all of which adds to banked cultural capital in their daily lives. These 'notes from the margin' speak to the enduring possibilities of everyday cultural practices, specifically as practiced within an interpretative community of female readers perched on the eastern edge of Canada.