'The Footpath Library'

The Global Studies Seminar welcomes Matthew Rosen presenting "Reading the Readers: The ‘Footpath Library’ as a Site of Cultural Assertion in a Once- Provincial City." ABSTRACT: This talk focuses on the concrete practices of spending time and sharing newspapers in a network of outdoor reading rooms or “footpath libraries” established by the Pune Municipal Corporation in 2004-2005. Drawing on conversations with readers I met at these sites, I suggest that the social institution of the newspaper library itself can be read as a site of cultural assertion for a new kind of urban community. With a nod to Benedict Anderson, whose central assertion in Imagined Communities was rooted in the idea of strangers communing through novels and newspapers, I call these accidental communities. Accidental, because partaking in the sociality of the reading room is born less of established social relationships than of accidents of history and geography. But communities, nevertheless, because the men (and it is only men) who come together in these spaces do so not just to read but also, importantly, to claim a place in the changing city. BIO: Matthew Rosen teaches in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from The New School for Social Research in New York City. His dissertation concerned a community of readers in Pune, a city of 3 million in western India, where he carried out 22 months of research with the support of AIIS, Fulbright, and NSF grants. Matthew’s current research examines the changing nature of “ordinary reading” in an age of mass literacy and global communication.