Exhibitions
The Colonial & Postcolonial History of the Book, 1765-2005
Reaching the Margins
An exhibition organised by the Open University in association with the University of London Institute of English Studies and the Senate House Library.
24th October – 18th November 2005
Introduction by Dr Robert Fraser, Open University and Institute of English Studies.
The exhibition Reaching the Margins accompanies a major international conference on this theme which will take place in Senate House during the November of 2005. As with the conference itself, the purpose is to explore and illustrate the internationalisation of print culture within the Anglophone world. We have chosen to concentrate on three geographical areas – Africa, India and Australia – partly because their histories are so different, and partly because all were caught for over a century in an imperial nexus to which they responded in characteristic and contrasted ways. The historical span involved stretches from the year of the establishment of British control in Bengal up to the present day.
At the centre of the display are a number of cases devoted to editions by nineteenth-century British publishers aimed at the colonial market. To either side sit a range of exhibits that question the "export" model of imperial culture thus suggested. To a remarkable extent the innovation and energy within colonial publishing operated locally: through missionary presses in remote locations, through railway editions of novels, though small presses which frequently distributed far and wide.
Exhibition and conference take their sub-title from the idea of a printed page, with a text centrally placed between margins. The purpose, however, is much less to adopt this as a satisfactory metaphor for cultural relations between metropolis and dependency than to query the pertinence of the model. To what extent - to continue the typographic figure – is such a view of publishing relations across these regions and dates "justified"? In the imperial – and even more so in the post-imperial context - which is the margin, which the text?
