Title: “The Breathtaking Ingenuity of Incarcerated Artists”
Author: Leslie Jamison
Publisher: The Atlantic
Date: February 7, 2021
Form: Cultural Criticism
Keywords: Visual art, Incarceration, Audience
Being able to precisely identify the target readership of your work informs not just how but also what you argue. If you know your readership, you not only know what they care about, but you might also have a sense of where the limits of their knowledge or methods lie, and what you can offer in terms of how to address those limits.
This post is about that dynamic—the way that identifying your readership can shape the nature of your argument. I want to focus in particular on how it plays out in terms of the pronoun that marks an author’s connection to their readers: the first-person plural “we” or “us.”
In her piece about “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration”—an exhibition at MoMA PS1 (and book) curated by Nicole R. Fleetwood—Leslie Jamison makes the following claim: the incarcerated artists whose work is included in the exhibition only give so much of themselves to the viewer. The pieces Jamison describes reveal something about the lives and experiences of their creators, but they also hold back, maintaining a degree of elusiveness and opacity. As she says of the subjects of one artist’s series of portraits, they “insist that we recognize their humanity and their privacy at once.”
Read in isolation, that “we” could be a little imprecise. “We” (like other plural pronouns) always risks bringing along with it a false sense of generalization. The author gestures toward the reader and makes a claim of identity with them—the “I” and the “you,” collapsed into the “we”—but sometimes the effect is alienation rather than fellow-feeling. Claims about how “we” think or act often exclude as many people as they include.
Jamison’s piece, though, is a great model in how to be specific about who you mean by “we.” Here’s the piece’s fourth paragraph, which contains the first instance of a first-person plural pronoun:
When art emerges out of conditions shaped by injustice, inequality, and brutality, we—and by “we,” I specifically mean people viewing the art who are not subject to the conditions under which it was produced—may reflexively expect it to be a transparent vessel delivering the terrible news of its own origins. From that angle, we risk seeing its creators as ethnographers, duty-bound to deliver the particulars of their dehumanization. But not all art that emerges from injustice wants to transcribe it; art can glance obliquely, using stolen sewing pins and tea-bag curtains to suggest longing and determination—to say, You can’t have all of me.
That move—“and by ‘we,’ I specifically mean…”—is fundamental to the piece’s argument. Jamison is addressing both the audience of this particular exhibition and, more generally, the audiences of any kind of art that’s produced from within contexts of injustice and viewed or read by people not experiencing those same injustices. In this moment, she’s both narrowing in on an audience (it’s not a universal but a specific “we”) and broadening her target readership: her piece is not just for people who’ve gone to see “Marking Time,” but rather for anyone who’s viewed art about dehumanization from a position of relative security, whether that’s a white person working their way through an anti-racist reading list or the reader of an online personal essay about trauma.
Identifying her readership in these terms makes it possible for Jamison to identify a limitation in her readers’ ways of understanding art (the tendency to assume that art made in contexts of injustice aims to directly transcribe that injustice), and to try, via the artworks she describes, to move beyond that limitation. Put more simply: the act of identifying her readership helps generate her argument.