Libraries Amid Protest: Books, Organizing, and Global Activism

Abstract

In the introductory essay to her book Feel Free (Penguin, 2019), Zadie Smith introduces us to Helen, the owner of a small independent bookstore in Northwest London that is about to be redeveloped. In providing a space where members of the public can be among books, browsing, pondering, being open to the surprise of what they might encounter, Smith describes Helen as providing an “essential service” that of “giving the people what they didn’t know they wanted” (Smith, Feel Free, 6). This essential service stands in stark contrast to the doctrine of commercial publishing and the Murdoch presses of “giving the people what they want,” which, in its banality, strips the experience of the printed word of all spontaneity, adventure, and wonder.It is into these ideological battles—of capitalism and the printed word—that Sherrin Frances’s book, Libraries Amid Protest: Books, Organizing, and Global Activism, interjects. Through an empirical examination of a number of “protest libraries”—a temporary physical collection of books that emerges spontaneously within a political occupation or encampment—in Turkey (Gezi Park), Madrid (BiblioSol), Ukraine (the Maidan Library in Kiev), Oakland, California (Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez), and New York (Occupy Wall Street), Frances not only offers an investigation of how these particular types of libraries unsettle capitalism, technology, materiality, and the configuration of space but at the same time illustrates the special, almost sacred, place books and libraries occupy in the psyche of many. As Frances puts it, her book aims to understand “how books, and spaces filled with books, have acted as powerful catalysts to change someone’s relationship to learning, to telling stories, to sharing space and resources, and to becoming part of a community” (5).Through in situ visits to a number of protest libraries before they were dismantled by state police; interviews with the protest libraries’ organizers, their users, supporters and detractors; and primary and secondary documents published by each protest movement articulating the aims and goals of the movement, Frances offers a comprehensive investigation into the modus operandi of many recent protest libraries. She couples her empirical work with a historical discussion of the development of the public library in the United States (being driven in large part by the finances and economic interests of Andrew Carnegie, chap. 6) and a more conceptual line of argument that interrogates “the human relationship with the sharing of books, space, and freedom of information” (4). Through these complementary lines of reasoning, Frances aims to show how it is in fact not America’s public libraries that are fulfilling their promise of providing the people with an essential service that gives them what they didn’t know they wanted, but protest libraries that emerge beyond the remit of capitalist imperative, most often in direct opposition to it, as functioning spaces of opportunity and resistance to the current status quo.Chapter 7, for example, is devoted to exploring the library as a social space truly free for everyone and not just a certain kind of “everyone” (92). Where public, state-run libraries have complicated histories when it comes to racism, segregation, and their treatment of minority groups, protest libraries, like the Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez in Oakland, were set up and run by volunteers with a history of conflict with law enforcement or people with varying immigration status. Being homeless, unshowered, or simply wanting a place to linger is not a barrier to enter a protest library like it is a public library in Houston or Chicago (96). On the contrary, the raison d’etre of the protest library is give to people a place to be free of work, responsibility, or production, to browse a leftist tract by Naomi Klein or Noam Chomsky, one devoted to economic rationalism by Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman, a graphic novel, a radical history, a romance novel, or fantasy fiction.Frances’s description of the People’s Library, which spontaneously emerged in Zucotti Park in New York as part of Occupy Wall Street on September 17, 2011, and was violently destroyed by city police on November 15, 2011, is a good example. During its two-month existence, the People’s Library housed around 12,000 books, all donated by members of the public. The books were sorted and organized by a voluntary working group through “directly democratic shelving,” that is, whoever was sorting the books on any given day was empowered to put items where they thought they best belonged (46). There was a searchable catalog, which was fluid and changed daily, that people could browse, borrow from (with no due date or late fees), or simply take to pass along to friends or other libraries. The derision of the state for such transgression of the status quo is evidenced in the night-time raid by police (under the pretense that the space constituted a health hazard) where thousands of books were thrown in dumpsters and severely damaged. Frances suggests that rather than the seeds of revolution being found within the books of state-sanctioned and -run public libraries, in their very existence protest libraries like Zucotti Park make revolution manifest. In contrast to the State (and state-run libraries) with its preference for order, defined rules, and hierarchical power, protest libraries arguably embody the true essence of what it means to be a “library”—a wholly open and inclusive space, with information that is freely available to all without any inherent need for “productive” or commercial value.While this book has a lot to recommend it, particularly to readers interested in libraries as spaces of disruption, protest, or of any of the particular protest libraries Frances studies, certain lines of enquiry could have been developed further. These include broadening the enquiry beyond its fairly US-centric conceptual base; deeper questioning of the book’s underlying narrative about why books are so dear to people and provoke such emotion; and/or elucidating more about what Frances alludes to as a new vision/definition of what a library actually is but never really fully articulates.Despite these shortcomings, which are potentially more personal preferences than integral flaws, Frances’s book intelligently weaves together theory, concept, and empirics to create a narrative that unmoors common assumptions about the relationship between libraries and capitalism—the incessant need for progress, growth, and especially productivity. In the same essay cited at the beginning of this review, Zadie Smith also laments the closure/redevelopment of her local library because “what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.” Smith argues that the power of the library is evoked by the visceral reality of the printed word, the unpredictability of what one might find in a place of books. For Smith, Frances, and, I think, many of us, these type of musings on protest and public libraries bring into being the type of society we want to live in—one where people can gather in community, where knowledge is valued, pondered, and freely available unhinged from capitalisms need for production. As Smith suggests, the only other place currently available where we can find communion with a similarly noble idea “requires belief in an omnipotent creator as a condition for membership” (Smith, Feel Free, 11).