The Political Novel in Reading Groups & What’s Novel about a Novel? Storytelling and Travelling Knowledge
Caponeu event26.03.2024
This workshop brought together experts in the delivery of community and prison reading groups and was designed to enable and inform the production of free downloadable resources for book clubs that will be available on the CAPONEU online platform. The event also included a public reading and conversation with the novelist Shida Bazyar. It was hosted as part of the CAPONEU work package “Travelling Knowledge: Global Epistemologies and the Political Novel in Europe”, which takes a critical view of dominant (Eurocentric) perspectives to ask how fiction might help knowledge circulate across class barriers, across time, across space and across communities.
The workshop opened with short input presentations from three experts with extensive experience of working with different types of reading groups in the UK and Croatia: Carolynn Bain (Afrori Books / Brighton Book Festival), Luiza Bouharaoua (Skribonauti) and Sarah Turvey (Prison Reading Groups UK). They each offered insights into their work with reading groups and reflected on the challenges they have entailed. Following this, we moved on to a brainstorming session in small groups, thinking about what reading groups can achieve politically and socially, and exploring ideas about what kinds of online resources might help to achieve those ends.
In the afternoon, all participants took part in a reading group session, led by Luiza Bouharaoua, which focused on Shida Bazyar’s novel Sisters in Arms, published in English translation (by Ruth Martin) in 2023. This exercise enabled us to reflect on different responses to the novel, shaped by different knowledges and experiences that reading group members bring to the table, and to think about the ways novels explore and expose epistemic justice and injustice (often as social justice and injustice). To round off the workshop, we returned to small groups to discuss further ideas for potential reading group resources, including the kinds of questions that might be asked in relation to the idea of ‘travelling knowledge’, before sharing these suggestions in a plenary session that reflected on ways forward. The Cambridge team is producing resources based on the workshop discussions; these resources will be made available on the CAPONEU digital platform.
The daytime workshop was followed by a public event hosted by Miriam Schwarz and Tara Talwar Windsor in conversation with Shida Bazyar. This reading and discussion explored how knowledge is treated and transported in Bazyar’s novel, taking its characters, readers and even its author on epistemic journeys. A recording of the public event can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7tEHIdHkgE
