Breach of Copy/rights: The University Copy District as Abject Zone
U of T Copy
At first sight, U of T Copy seems to be an erroneously named establishment. It is not located in the sprawling district of copy shops that borders the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. Rather, U of T Copy is approximately five kilometers west of the university, where a network of train tracks, factories, car dealerships, and newly gentrified houses and artist lofts intersect.
The first time I visited U of T Copy, I was illegally copying several out-of-print books borrowed from the University of Toronto library. After commenting on the source of my books and asking about my affiliation with the university, the owner of U of T Copy boasted about the other academics who frequent his shop. As he surveyed my books, I surveyed the row of diplomas and certificates hanging on the wall above the self-serve copiers. The documents offered a familiar narrative of immigration, education, and employment and a possible explanation for the copy shop’s out-of-place name. A Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree, both from the University of Winnipeg, and a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto hung next to a real-estate license, an insurance-sales license, and a certificate verifying the owner’s ability to fix copy machines. On subsequent visits, the owner of U of T Copy completed the narrative implied by his diplomas, which he dismissively described as “just paper.” I was not surprised to learn that he completed four years of doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of Toronto before he was forced to abandon his studies due to financial and familial responsibilities in Canada and Vietnam.
As someone connected to the university, I was left with the impression that the owner of U of T Copy welcomed my presence even more than my business. He became especially delighted when his two-year-old son, Nicholas, expressed an interest in my stack of books. Still in diapers, Nicholas already displayed many bookish habits. As I engaged in the monotonous task of copying out-of-print books from cover to cover, he playfully copied my act of copying with other books retrieved from my bag, taking care to never crease a page or crack a spine. I knew that Nicholas, who has yet to learn his alphabet, already understood the value of books. I also knew that the name of his father’s copy shop is not the result of a geographic miscalculation; the hastily painted sign hanging outside U of T Copy was never intended to tell customers where they are, but rather to tell them where the proprietor ought to be (see fig. 1).
My account of U of T Copy is significant precisely because it draws attention to a configuration of spaces, practices, and technologies that are typically taken for granted. With the exception of legal discourses on the photocopier’s threat to copyright law and a limited number of studies on its role in micro- and self-publishing initiatives, researchers have paid little attention to the photocopier and even less attention to modern copy shops and their owners.1 This is somewhat surprising, since most academics spend a considerable amount of time photocopying, often illegally, and many academics teach on campuses that are surrounded by districts of independently owned copy shops. In The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1979), Elisabeth Eisenstein remarks that one of the far-reaching consequences of movable type is its impact on the nature of scholarship, specifically historical research. Historians are “indebted to Gutenberg’s invention,” she maintains, since “print enters their work from start to finish.” She further remarks, “Because historians are usually eager to investigate major changes and this change transformed the conditions of their own craft, one would expect the shift to attract some attention. . . . Yet any historiographical survey will show the contrary to be true” (3). In the past three decades, due in part to Eisenstein’s study, literary critics, historians, and sociologists have increasingly turned their attention to the histories of medieval manuscript and print cultures. Photocopying has had much less impact on scholarly work, but it may represent another example of a technology that academics have failed to recognize as integral to their work. Although it is unlikely that a stack of photocopied materials will ever have the symbolic currency carried by a wall of printed books, most academics would find it difficult to imagine conducting research or teaching without access to photocopying. My interest in the copy shops and the copy districts that border many university campuses recognizes that these localities offer insights into not only the history of print cultures but also the changing nature of the university and its relation to the state, the academy, and patterns of migration in the early twenty-first century.
Clustered on the border of urban university campuses, copy districts represent geographic and symbolic boundaries. This is especially true in the case of subtly fortified campuses, such as the University of Toronto’s St. George campus, which exists in a clearly demarcated urban location where it simultaneously benefits from and claims to contribute to the diverse cultural life of the city while effectively filtering out most pedestrian traffic. In this case, the copy district acts as a visible buffer between the university and the city. A pedestrian zone inhabited by academics and the people who serve them, the copy district caters to the needs of the university and is dependent upon the university for survival, but despite such interdependence, it belongs to the city rather than the university. This status is essential, since the copy district is not only a known site of illegal copying but also a site sometimes associated with the reproduction of forged documents, including documents used to aid people’s movement across borders. Notably, these borders are both geographic and symbolic. Copy shops are sites where people frequently reproduce the documents required to apply for passports (e.g., birth certificates and photo IDs) and the documents required to move across institutional thresholds (e.g., résumés, reference letters, and transcripts). It is nearly impossible to estimate the extent to which photocopying technologies, as a form of document production that can take place with minimal surveillance, facilitate the reproduction of fraudulent documents.
In this respect, the copy district that clings to the edges of the urban university campus arguably represents an “abject zone,” a term Anne McClintock uses to describe sites that are invariably part of society but are inhabited by people and practices that society-at-large must repudiate (1995: 72). Although McClintock’s discussion is primarily concerned with the abject zone in the context of nineteenthcentury British imperialism, abject zones also serve an important role in contemporary processes of globalization. Like the Victorian era’s slums and brothels, today’s refugee camps and first world ghettos inhabited by third world professionals2 are sites where the erosion of national boundaries is both most apparent and most vigorously policed. In my reading of the interrelations between the academy, the city, and the manuscript, print, and copy cultures, the university is the social entity that must struggle to assert itself as orderly. The copy districts that border many urban university campuses are cast as spaces inhabited by everything the university must reject yet cannot live without, including the unauthorized reproduction of texts and the labor of a skilled but underrecognized workforce comprised largely of immigrant laborers.
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Notes
The author wishes to thank Heather Milne in the department of English at York University, the participants at McGill University’s Print Culture and the City Conference, where an earlier version of this paper was presented in March 2004, and the innumerable copy shop workers who continue to support and inform her work.
- Beyond technical manuals and legal discourses on the photocopier’s relation to copyright laws and publishing, the photocopier has been largely ignored as a subject of research. Some notable exceptions include Julian E. Orr’s Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (1996) and Hillel Schwartz’s “Ditto” in The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (1996). Several studies on the production of zines also discuss the photocopier’s contribution to cultural production in the late twentieth century; see in particular Chris Dodge’s “The Revolution Will Be Photocopied: A Trip to the Underground Publishing Conference Reveals that America’s Alternative Press Is Livelier Than Ever” (2001), and Stephen Duncombe’s Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (1997). I discovered no studies that focus on the subject of copy shops and copy districts or the people who work in these sites.
- According to 2001 Canadian census statistics, nearly half (49.4 percent) of Toronto’s population is comprised of immigrants, and 42 percent of these immigrants are recent arrivals (people who have immigrated in the past decade). Census statistics further reveal that most of the city’s new arrivals are visible and linguistic minorities who have moved to Canada from China, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or the Philippines ( Social Policy Analysis Research Unit 2003). Given Canada’s immigration guidelines that privilege immigrants who possess professional and graduate degrees but do not guarantee that these credentials will be recognized once applicants arrive in the country, it is not surprising that a growing number of Toronto’s working-class neighborhoods are now populated by highly educated immigrants. In a 2004 series on Thorncliffe Park, an apartment complex located in a working-class suburb of Toronto, Jan Wong of the Globe and Mail observed, “At Thorncliffe Park, PhDs in genetic engineering serve doughnuts at Tim Hortons. Those with MBAs ‘volunteer’ endlessly, hoping free labour will count toward that elusive, all-important qualification: Canadian experience.” The series of articles, each focusing on one or more of Thorncliffe Park’s educated but displaced residents, offers a stark depiction of the people who have been permitted to cross international borders on the basis of their recognized credentials yet who are forced to wait, sometimes indefinitely, for their credentials to be recognized by Canadian professional associations, universities, and businesses.
