Libraries and the Reading Public in Twentieth-Century America

From the Underground to the Stacks and Beyond: Girl Zines, Zine Librarians, and the Importance of Itineraries through Print Culture

R ecently, as part of an effort to revisit the question of how correlations between literacy and power function, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing—familiarly known as SHARP— organized its 2010 conference around the theme “Book Culture from Below.” The initial call for papers suggested that conference presenters direct their attention beyond the legitimate precincts of book culture and the literate elites who typically inhabit them to investigate “the under-represented and the oppressed.”1 Those generally excluded from book culture were glossed initially as peasants and the laboring classes, but the call observed additionally that presenters might also consider a range of others who have operated without the privileges of traditional literate elites yet have managed, through their “independence and initiative,” to adapt the tools of book culture to their own purposes. This organizing strategy repeats the now familiar post-1968 tactic inspired in the United States by the work of feminist scholarship; labor and workingclass history; African American and Native American studies; gay, lesbian, and queer studies; and ethnic studies as well. Indeed, the animating metaphors of “outside” and “below” have done useful work for years by enabling scholars to recover the forgotten or actively erased histories of subordinated populations . Together, the two metaphors guided early research strategies that were designed to redress the bias toward the cultural productions of the writing and reading classes who dominated older forms of political, intellectual, and military history; literary studies; art history; bibliography; and library studies. As a consequence, forgotten texts, popular culture, underground and alternative 237 From the Underground to the Stacks and Beyond  Girl Zines, Zine Librarians, and the Importance of Itineraries through Print Culture janice a. radway literary forms, material culture, folklore, and folklife began to figure significantly within all of these disciplines. Despite the evident utility of the idea of narrating history from below, now—after more than three decades of work—this too homogeneous and spatialized way of conceptualizing power seems more a hindrance than a help in the effort to trace peoples’ literacy practices. To begin with, many have pressed upon us the importance of attending not simply to the history of books but rather to the history of print more broadly.2 This is important because the dismissed and dispossessed have had to turn frequently to cheaper and more ephemeral forms, like newspapers and magazines, pamphlets, handbills , posters, and newsletters to make their concerns known. The book circuit was not always open to them. More significant, as these oppositional scholarly discourses evolved in proximity to, and in dialogue with, each other, as well as in the context of post-structuralist and Foucauldian theories of power, together they began to challenge the idea that dispossessed subjects or groups can be construed homogeneously as simple reflections of their particular spatial or cultural origins on the outside. Such scholars have insisted on the necessity of understanding diversity not simply as an external condition of the world population generally but also as an internal feature of individual subjects and differentiated groups and subgroups. Neither individuals nor groups can be assumed to be uniform or homogenous, the argument goes. Neither can they be construed as driven by a purity of understanding or purpose born of a place of origin or point in a fixed social hierarchy. Rather, they must be understood as internally diverse, the result of conflicted and contested social and biographical histories. Both individuals and groups need to be seen as complex, multifarious , and disparate—one might even say divided and disjunct. So, too, must the print forms they have created. This way of conceptualizing subjectivity and the social as inherently fractured is significantly different from any framework that seeks to locate individuals and groups as above or below, inside or outside, elite or dispossessed, authentically oppositional or unwittingly incorporated. Such a binary formulation construes power as something one either has or hasn’t. It tends to ignore the possibility that there might be multiple forms of power and competing arenas where control is differently organized, thus leading to contention and contestation. This simplistic view of power underwrites the supposedly remedial “from below” perspective, because it suggests that dissent and opposition can come only from outside a dominant social formation. Significantly, this 238 janice a. radway spatialized view of power excludes the possibility that some privileged individuals participate in print culture from dissident perspectives while others forge alliances across class...