Censored dissident writing demands active audience co-construction of meaning

Evidence

It is hard to know if Sanüa is presenting a satiric portrait of a young upper-class woman when he puts these words in Banbah’s mouth, and thus criticizing this kind of racial divide. I think Juan Cole’s assessment of the interplay between journalist and reader is applicable to the communication between audience and playwright (in his discussion of journalists, Cole addresses Sanüa as well). As Cole states, “Their [the dissident journalists’] political essays constituted an open text with which the audience could interact, teasing out their full semiotic implications. In this conception, audiences formed no helpless target of a fully elaborated, crystalline discourse, but rather constituted partners in the enterprise of sign generation and interpretation. Dissident journalism, especially given the circumlocution and ambiguity forced on it by censorship, was a game it took two to play.” — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 378

Categorization

• XREF: This open-text theory of reading under censorship parallels how the reader’s other sources treat encoded discourse under authoritarian regimes, and bears on reading satiric drama as historical evidence for racial attitudes.