ABSTRACT
The phrase “public library” implies an institution that is open, accessible, and available to all. But who and what determines this entity known as the “public?” The project described in this essay offers a striking example of a community in Boston that came to be an “unpublic” for the city’s library services, with the closing in 1956 of the city’s Chinatown branch. But there is another story here as well: one of sustained neighborhood resistance to fallacious assumptions about the Chinese community as a “readership.” This local activism persisted for decades and inspired an exhibition—titled “These Words”—in 2016 that celebrated a century of the neighborhood’s print, publishing, and reading activities. Through large window panels, displayed in buildings on two widely-traveled streets, digitized material from the Chinese Historical Society created installations that challenged these exclusionary narratives. In the winter of 2018, after an absence of over six decades, a Chinatown branch reopened and is now a widely-used neighborhood resource. The specifics of how this project developed and its results will be considered, alongside a broader discussion of the complexities and potential of the use of strategies from humanities practices to both reveal the edges and to expand what a constitutes a “public.”
