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Reading Together: “Communitarian Reading” and Women Readers in Colonial Bengal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Swati Moitra
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Abstract

In this article, I seek to consider this practice of “communitarian” reading—reading aloud, reading together—as a defining aspect of the cultures of reading among Bengali women in the nineteenth century. I wish to contest the privileging of “silent” reading as a “modern” mode of reading and the subsequent celebration of the protean incorporeality of the “silent” reader, in the works of prominent scholars of readership, arguing that the privileging of “silent” reading as the predominant “modern” mode of reading does not offer a sufficient framework for the study of reading practices of the “historical” “woman reader” in the age of colonial “modernity” in a terrain such as that of Bengal. The article thus engages with alternate frameworks of considering the practice of reading aloud, drawing upon diverse feminist scholarship on practices of reading to argue in favor of considering the practice of “communitarian” reading as a form of female sociality for Bengali women in the nineteenth century, at a time when public spaces remained largely inaccessible to women.

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Hypatia , Volume 32 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Contested Terrains: Women of Color and Third World Women, Feminisms, and Geopolitics , Summer 2017 , pp. 627 - 643
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Copyright © 2017 by Hypatia, Inc.

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