Understanding Whiteness Part 21: Knowing the audience
The previous post in this series ended with the following paragraph:
Some people want whiteness to remain in its 18th century season one incarnation, immortalised in the persona of its opening act ie: dominant and superior. Others want to see whiteness change and grow and evolve. To learn about itself, to atone and navigate its own guilt. To become an ally perhaps. To have a soft death, and emerge, reborn. Here, it is our expectations and demands of dominant ideologies that can steer their development, going forward.
Before concluding with this interesting idea:
And this is where the audience possibly becomes the most important force of all…
Finding your audience
It sounds obvious, but stories can’t exist without someone to consume them. As a result, the wants and needs of an audience becomes tantamount to the nature of the story being told. What we now take to be the modern novel has evolved over centuries, appealing to different audiences at different times. The needs of these various audiences undoubtedly shaped the way that novels have been written – be it for pure entertainment, to challenge social norms, to provoke political debate, or to break sensational taboos.
These varying motivations can change not only how a story is told but also what the content of a story is. In the 18th century, the onset of the romantic novel introduced a blueprint of heroism, virtue and emotional exploration that novels still adhere to, aimed at audiences who wanted something illicit, but also to learn life lessons along the way. By this time, literacy rates in Europe were high enough to make novels accessible to most social classes, giving them the capacity to become popular. So of course, the style of novels became more populist, appealing to a broad audience seeking literary entertainment laced with wit, humour and excitement.
When we think about race as a story being told, all of this begs a simple question: who is the story of race actually for?
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