This chat celebrates and reflects on the work presented at SHARP 2024 by keynotes Asha Rogers and Swara Shukla. If you missed the in-person conference, you can watch recordings of Asha’s and Swara’s talks on YouTube.

Andie: Tell us about yourself: what is your current career status/role? Where do you currently live?

Asha: I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. I live in London.

Swara: I am now in my final year of my PhD, focusing on book studies. I am in Münster, Germany, which is very close to the Netherlands border. Corinna Norrick-Rühl is now my supervisor, but actually she’s the one that got me to SHARP in the first place before I even moved to Germany to start my PhD, by facilitating my attendance at the virtual 2021 conference, which her team at Münster were organizing.

Andie: That’s amazing, and actually the perfect segue to our next question! So what is your history with SHARP, Swara and Asha?

Asha: I have been on the ‘interested periphery’ of SHARP for about a decade. I admired the work of various SHARP people during my PhD on the relations between the modern state and anglophone literary cultures after World War II. I became more involved over the past year, and took on the Director of Awards role this Spring. As someone with academic interests in prize/award cultures it is very interesting to be involved in the processes and practices, as well as to think critically (and hopefully) about what they might achieve.

Swara: My history is fairly recent. Back in 2021 I was in India working at the Indian subsidiary of Penguin. So basically, my life was just cubicle walls! And I just really wanted to do something more research focused, and I had an idea in my head about serialization. So I did a pandemic conference called, if I remember correctly, “Pandemic Bookshelves.” [Before that conference] I never heard of book history or book studies, and that looked very interesting, so I started Googling and stumbled across the SHARP web page, got in touch with Corinna and Shef both of whom were unbelievably helpful. I’m still in touch with Shef; he was the person who informed me I was being considered for a keynote and gave me words of encouragement from the start. Eventually something worked out with Corinna [for my PhD]. I was trying to work something out with both of them, but because of the pandemic, New Zealand didn’t have open borders at the time, but Germany worked out. I owe that to SHARP, and I think the first conference I attended was the online conference in 2021.

Andie: It was great getting to know your work at this year’s SHARP annual conference! Can you tell us a little more about your research? 

Asha: At present I am  reflecting on how Book History methods play a role in revisiting familiar debates on language in postcolonial and African literary studies. I’m doing archival work on the missionary, publishing and educational histories that link Britain and the African continent in the twentieth century, which all stage various  issues of language ‘imperialism’,  diversity and vulnerability.

In my talk I discussed two different examples where religious, print, educational institutions might  construct ephemerality; this is an idea drawn from Ashleigh Harris’ work, about how   things get positioned outside of the line of sight, historically, in disciplinary terms, or whatever. My example was the first published novel in the Igbo language novel, Omenuko by Peter Nwana, which was denied permission for translation for years .  I then flipped perspectives by showing how such organizations can also act as adversaries of that ephemerality by helping creative forms exist, or exist beyond their geographical conditions and historical moments. My example here was the book distribution co-operative Third World Publications, which imported books from the African continent into Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. The colonial history of the book trade meant the global flow of books was almost exclusively in the other direction.

Swara: The idea behind my dissertation project is to look at the Victorian serial market and Victorian serial cultures and how they help us approach [modern] literary and reading cultures in different ways. The project considers how this idea of serial culture would look like in platform cultures, because serialization is one of their most popular strategies, despite us not really realizing it. Serialization and seriality as concepts are very adaptable, so you can approach them in so many different ways. And the inherent ideas of building anticipation – it’s this tug-of-war between complete and incomplete, between disruption and continuity. You see that translating into so many different contexts, including platforms, including digital cultures, which I think kind of thrive on seriality because there is this pressure to be consistent, to be constantly on the scene. I’m using the heuristic of the Wattpad platform, which started out as a fan fiction platform, but right now, as you might have seen in the keynote as well, has transformed into a proper book ecosystem, and you can approach that in many different ways. You can approach it as a media empire, as only a platform, or from fan fiction viewpoints as well. My approach to it is as a publishing pathway that is guided, mediated, and facilitated by serialization. So my main interests are serialization as a publishing practice, how that works on the platform, and the reading cultures around it that we see because so many of the reading markers and reading metrics are visible. So I’m thinking about what kind of gaps [in understanding serialized reading] we can fill in by tracing these practices in relation to serialization as a strategy. 

Andie: How did the work you presented at SHARP get started?

Asha: The work on Omenuko began in the publishing archives at the University of Reading.  I was doing a project on the presence of African languages in the Heinemann African Writers Series with Hyei Jin Kim. I found an author publishing contract that I didn’t know what to make of, and it went from there.

The work on the Birmingham group was the most surprising. I called up a lot of niche books in the British Library related to Black British, African literature, education, and so on, and kept seeing this pricing sticker on the back that read ‘Third World Books, 151 Stratford Road, Birmingham’. Because I have personal and professional interests in Birmingham, I needed to know more. So it really is just the story of a pricing sticker; of “reading” the material book.

Swara: Honestly, I just wanted to get some feedback on the chapter that I was working on! It was a chapter I was most scared of because it wasn’t part of my original proposal. I saw the word “marginalia” in an article, and it just stuck with me, and I kept wanting to make something of it, mostly because reading comments [on Wattpad] – they are very intrusive. They impinge on your reading experience when you’re looking at the platform. And for people who are not familiar with the platform interface, the same thing happens with a social media post. You have certain engagement metrics that add meaning and shape that content. And I just kept falling into a rabbit hole of reading the comments whenever I was working with a text, so I tried to look up how to analogize it in a digital context. I think you can get so much from book history and learning from the history of literature and print cultures to find analogies and parallels. And that’s what the concept of remediation also teaches us, right? Every media kind of builds on the shortcomings of cultures preceding it. So in [contemporary] print cultures marginalia was really sparse, not readily available. Now we have this rare insight into the reading experience but it’s almost something you can take for granted in digital platforms and digital culture. It’s something that affects your reading experience and it’s something that affects your writing experience, especially when you’re talking about serializing stories. 

Andie: And there’s a direct parallel with commonplace books too, right? Because commonplace books, especially in their manuscript form, circulated amongst groups of friends or fellow writers, and there is very much that spirit of community and of annotation and interaction with the text. That seems to be resurfacing in a similarly authentic way in this digital space.

Swara: Oh yeah, I generally think that all of these concepts and ideas have existed long before the 21st century, long before the digital age, definitely, and these it’s all about finding domains in which they resurface. So yes, the idea of sharing annotated books and then responding to them is very mimetic. It’s like a proto social media. But the argument is that they all existed before, we’re just seeing them being named and made more visible and therefore more approachable and acceptable.

Andie: Changing topics a bit, Asha’s talk underscored that representation in book history is more complex than it appears, and many agents participate in gatekeeping what literature is accessible to English-speaking audiences. Asha, do you see self-publishing and the proliferation of platforms like Wattpad, which Swara discussed in her talk, as a potential avenue for more inclusivity and representation? What are other ways we can decentralize European perspectives/practices in book history?

Asha: The global unevenness in publishing and communication is nothing new – and I would defer to Swara and those who have researched platforms like Wattpad to comment on how useful they are on that point. But it can be useful to bring critical thinking to terms like ‘inclusion’ and ‘representation’ – what do they really mean? Where are their limits? And how have these matters been staged in the past? 

On the point about decentering historically European perspectives and practices, I would point to the excellent roundtable on how to decolonise book history scholarly practices organised by Melanie Ramdarshan Bold and Danielle Fuller in 2020, and its follow up the year after, which took things a step further beyond Europe and North America. (There is a great report of the former by Andrea Reyes Elizondo and Jean Lee Cole in SHARP News and you can watch the panel back on YouTube). 

For me, it invariably comes back to structures and systems, funding and resource, or what Reyes Elizondo and Lee Cole call the “Elephant’s Cousin” – ie. If colonialism is the “elephant” in the room, the concentration of academic resources is its close relation. This is partly what has motivated my research interest in situations where translation of African language writing has been  prevented (as with Omenuko), or where collectives have attempted to intervene in the global communication structures and try to  go beyond the ‘talking shop’ of international policy (as with Third World Publications).  Freely accessible web resources are important, obviously, when it comes to flows of information and academic paywalls. (On the latter, Pritha Mukherjee did a great paper at SHARP 2024 on piracy that used the absolutely prohibitive price of my 2020 book State Sponsored Literature to indicate why pirated PDFs are so essential to Indian students). The conditions of academic publication make it really difficult for most people to access research. 

This is also about methodology and allowing what we encounter – archive, text, narrative, other verbal expression — to transform how we approach it. That is the creative part and the intellectually stimulating part for me. A good example of this argument is made by Peter D. McDonald in Book History who talks about approaching  the material book through its linguistic qualities. This is particularly rich with African language printed texts because of the interplay between materiality and language and authorising institutions. In short, it involves recognising that how we are shaped informs what we might work with and how, but that the material we encounter can also transform us and how we work.

Andie: Back to you, Swara! Your work on digital marginalia is fascinating. What do you find stimulating about studying paratexts at the digital level? Do you see a connection between popularity/social media trends and personal taste playing out in readers’ receptions through marginalia?

That’s a deceptively complicated question! 

I think what’s exciting about the user participation that we see of reader responses and engagements is in meaning making: they are defining a new rubric of success on these platforms, because a content that hasn’t seen engagements wouldn’t be considered successful, you know? One of my case studies is a book called Given by [Nandi] Taylor; she has mentioned in many of her interviews that she tried multiple platforms with a similar story and did not garner engagement. So within the parameters of those platforms, that was a completely unsuccessful story, and then you have this completely different platform which made her successful in both platform rubrics and also within the traditional book market. So what exactly is success? How much have you defined by algorithms, and how different are these algorithms, right? My intention with the talk (and the dissertation, eventually) is to explore this empowerment that you get when you decide that users are in control. This is a conflict you found in Victorian markets as well: the power of a mass number of readers was for the first time discovered in continuing publication processes, in a story being able to continue on. And today when we think about Victorian serialized stories, the stories that did not garner readership, that did not continue publication — we don’t know those stories at all. No one reads them. They don’t get releases aside for maybe some digital archives that you might find them in. So all of these complicated mechanisms of success, of concentration, of text, of authors, is something I find interesting. That’s what I think we see in paratext. 

Which brings me to the more complicated question. The very broad answer is yes, we do find the connection between tastemaking and popular trends (and here I’m talking about commercial platforms, not fan fiction platforms, or Wattpad in its pre commercialized form). These more commercialized ventures are very carefully curated by algorithms and then offered to users; so you are not making a free choice. You are making a choice based on some very filtered content, and I think that is where we find a relationship between trends, between popularity and the reader reception, because the reader reception, whether it’s votes, the number of readers, or comments, they are all reflective of choices that have been made before they got the visibility that they needed to then make their own choice. 

I have one very anecdotal example of this when it comes to Wattpad. The Wattpad feed makes some recommendations to you based on “Trending” tabs. Last year, one of the very insistent recommendations my homepage was making me was around Taylor Swift. Any story that featured Taylor Swift, also fanfiction on her, anything that held the prominent tag of Taylor Swift. But my user profile on Wattpad has never engaged the tag of Taylor Swift. So Taylor Swift as a keyword is dominating the online space, and fits into Wattpad, understandably, because it’s a similar demographic. So Wattpad trying to peddle the same thing to me — it’s a very macro level example, but that kind of reiterates what I’m trying to say, that the curation of the platform is already mediating the choices that I as a consumer can make in the first place. So any kind of reader interest, whether that’s rankings, whether that’s reader comments, they are coming from that [commercialized] place.

Andie: Asha quoted a crucial question in her talk:  “who benefits from publishing”? How important is it for your work to account for the financial dimensions of the book trade? How does that change the ways we look at books and book history?

Asha: I haven’t got much to say here – or perhaps, too much!

Swara: Well, one way of looking at it is through the idea of financial complicity. One aspect of it in my work is questioning the very term “democratic.” Wattpad has been promoted and marketed as [such]… the promotional language around it is all about diversity and democratization of literature and me and Claire Parnell, who I think mentioned a lot in my keynote, and even Sarah Brouillette. I think of it from two perspectives: authorship and readership. When I come to authorship, there is a lot of unpaid labor being performed by authors to get to the parameters of monetization within the platform, using the algorithms to help with visibility and discoverability. So there’s actually more content not visible than that that’s been made visible to us today, and so the author themself perform a lot of labor, again, something that I look at through the dissertation so where the authors before being able to get to a point where they could even be considered for monetization by the platform, they have to participate in forums. They have to participate in different readers’ comments. They have to engage with other authors about similar stories or similar talks and comment on there, and then make recommendations of their own work. So there’s so much unseen labor going on before you even reach the point where you’re monetizing the platform. So if you find some sort of success metric on the platform, you’re entering similar gatekeeping challenges to the traditional market where, again, you have to go through an editorial process, not just algorithmic screening, to eventually get to a point where you get to perform the labor for money. 

Then there’s the reading labor. And reading labor goes largely unmonetized. You don’t really get monetized for your reading and reading labor is probably even more important in sustaining platforms, and especially user generated spaces like Wattpad than authorial labor, because without reading labor, you wouldn’t really have any of the systems on gatekeeping and the publishing pathways and revenue streams working right? So Sarah Bruillette does incredible work on how reading labor is performed and how it goes and monetized. And digital cultures really thrive on reading labor without compensation. I agree with Parnell’s conclusion that despite the efforts, despite the promotional language around it, despite all the buzzwords, I feel digital platforms do tend to perpetuate a certain level of exclusion and marginalization.

Andie: I mean, just your example of the Taylor Swift tag coming your way, right? It’s not like Wattpad all of a sudden said, Hey, do you want to read this Indigenous author who has like, 12 books already in the platform? No, it said, do you want to read about Taylor Swift? 

Swara: Exactly, yeah. And I think this has only happened after the commercialization. I found this very interesting to talk about in the Q & A [following the keynote]. Reddit has a fairly uncommercialized usage, and it is faced with a very interest-based engagement. It’s a gold mine for you to kind of get a glimpse into the back end, without actually approaching the people involved. You can see complaints, for example, are about how spaces [in Wattpad] like DMs and forums have been discontinued, how recommendation algorithms have completely changed, because of commercialization and the move to the traditional book market.

Andie: Where can we read or learn more about your work? 

Asha: My book State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 is available in some libraries, on Googlebooks and pirated online(!). I’m happy to discuss its access with anyone who wants to read it and can’t. Some of its key materials are on the website www.statesponsoredliterature.com. A recent article on Kenyan and British changes to the high school literature curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s – or ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ at decolonization – is available Open Access here.

Swara: My most recent publication is with Anglistik: the International Journal of English Studies, focusing on ESL user-generated fiction. It just come out a couple of weeks ago! It’s also available Open Access here.

Andie: Finally, a crucial book nerd question: what are you reading right now? 

Asha: The back catalogue of Jamaica Kincaid.

Swara: I just finished [Paul Murray’s] The Bee Sting, I finished reading it just a few minutes before this interview! It was shortlisted for the Booker last year. It’s a very frustrating (in a good way!) read, and the Irish setting itself is kind of a character. It’s set after the [2008] crash, centered on a very dysfunctional family — very dark, very frustrating — the kind of fiction that gives you a hangover.