Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Our Nig Audience
An audience is being constructed with any type of media that we are exposed to. After reading "Our Nig" and learning about audience construction throughout numerous classes, I think that anyone that decides to read "Our Nig" will probably be constructed in most of the same way. As the story is explained, the reader seems to begin to feel sad of angry for Frado. With all the details that the author includes in her book, she connects with her readers on an emotional level, allowing her readers to feel many emotions and react differently depending on how they feel. I feel like Wilson's main goal was not to make you feel bad for her, but to pass on her story and make it known. I feel like she achieved the goal of reader reaction. She does this through her words and how she chooses to arrange them. Wilson did a good job in constructing the reader to feel the way she wanted. "Our Nig" is about a black being treated like she was never free and the exigency was how we connected with the author and the book.
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Patrick, I definitely agree with you about why Wilson wrote "Our Nig." Her appeals to pathos were not to evoke an emotion of sympathy, but rather of awareness from the reader. She wants the reader to understand and be able to get a look into her life as a "free black." I also do not think that she wished for her novel to create a change in society or create a change in race inequality. However, I do wonder who her specific audience was...or if she even had a specific audience. Was she writing to the United States as a whole? Or to whites? Blacks? Free blacks? I don't think it is very clear who her specific audience is, but I do know that it was not meant to target legislators or government officials. If I had to guess, I would say that her main intended audience was normal, everyday American citizens that were not aware of how some free blacks, such as herself, lived. She merely wanted people to get a glimpse of what life was like for some people that were considered "free."
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