Book Festivals and the Special Economic Zone of Culture

The essay argues, first, that the book festival is a specific type of formal enclosure, and second, that we might draw a productive analogy with another kind of capitalist enclosure, namely the special economic zone (SEZ). As enclosures synonymous with global capital, SEZs have come under significant scrutiny by economists who hotly debate their local and national impacts, while the activities that occur within the zone are strangely illegible; book festivals are similarly scrutinized by and yet opaque to literary scholars. Using the case study of the long-running Welsh Hay Festival and its international sister festivals as its basis, this essay draws on the archives of the festival, currently being processed at the British Library, and interviews conducted with current staff. It does so to argue that the book festival is a historically specific strategy of space that has emerged out of our modern globalized economy.