By subverting lyric convention, which normally uses the personal first-person I, Rankine speaks to the inherently unstable (Chan 140) positionality of Black people in America, whose bodily existence is threatened on a daily basis by microaggression which treat the black body either as an invisible object, or as something to be derided, policed or imprisoned (Chan 140). Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. In the photograph, there are no black bodies hanging, just the space where the two black bodies once were (Chan 158). At times I wondered why she for example attributes a single horrible quotation about Serena to a monumental non-existent entity called "the American Media." This disrupts the historically white lyric form even further because she is adapting and changing the lyric form to include her Black identity and perspective. The dominance of white space in the text (Rankine 3, 12, 21-22, 45, 47, 59, 81-82, 93, 108, 125, 133, 148-149) illuminates how this erasure of the black body takes place in white spaceswhere the environment is white or dominated by whiteness. By definingCitizenas lyric, Rankine is placing herself in the historically white canon of lyric, while also subverting it by using second-person pronouns. This symbolism of the deer, which signifies the hunting and dehumanization of Black people, is emphasized throughout the work through the repetition of sighing, moaning, and allusions to injury: To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/732928.Sdf, The Dissolving Blues of Metaphor: Rankines Reconstruction of Racism as Metaphor in Citizen: An American Lyric, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". Claudia Rankine (2014). In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. She writes in second person: "you." Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. April 23, 2015 issue. I nearly always would rather spend time with a novel. You can't put the past behind you. And this is why I read books. The inescapability of their social condition and positioning, of their erasure and vulnerability, is also emphasized in Rankines highly stylised poem about the Jena Six (98-103). Black people are facing a triple erasure: first through microaggresions and racist language that renders them second-class citizens; then through lynching and other forms of violence that murders the black body; and lastly, through forgetting. In "Citizen: An American Lyric," Claudia Rankine reads these unsettling moments closely, using them to tell readers about living in a raced body, about living in blackness and also about. Figure 2. Suduiko, Aaron ed. When she tells him not to get all KKK on the teenagers, he says, Now there you go, trying to make it seem like the protagonist is the one who has overstepped, not him. 3, 2019, pp. Biss, Eula. SHOTTS: It is an utterly amazing honor to work with Claudia. I'll just say it. Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. I highly recommend the audio version. After a tense pause, he tells her that he can take his calls wherever he wants, and the protagonist is instantly embarrassed for telling him otherwise. 134, no. Refine any search. Complete your free account to request a guide. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. Rankine writes from great depth, personal experiences, and also from a greater, inclusive point of view. Overview Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. By Parul Sehgal, Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2015. It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . Racist language, however, erase[s] you as a person (49), and this furious erasure (142) of Black people strips them of their individuality and the rights that come with an I that are given during citizenship. Her repetition of this question beckons us to ask ourselves these questions, and the way the question transitions from a focus on the lingering impact of the event (haveyou seen their faces) to a question of historicity (didyou see their faces) emphasizes the ways these black bodies disappear from life (presence) to death (absence). The purposeful omission of the black bodies highlights yet again the erasure of Black people, while also showing us that this erasure goes beyond daily acts of microaggressions or the systemic forgetting of Black communities (Rankine 6, 32, 82). In the image (Figure 2), the deers body looks distortedits legs are oddly bent, its fourth leg is obscured, and one of its legs is cut off by the margin of the page. The way the content is organized, LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in. Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen The 92nd Street Y, New York 261K subscribers Subscribe 409 Share 32K views 7 years ago Poet Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen=, her recent meditation. We often say Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about. The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. This ahistorical perspective ignores that the present is directly linked to past injustices, as they inform the way people of color are, Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. The protagonist insists that the man is her friend, reminding the neighbor that he has even met this person, but the neighbor refuses to believe this, saying that he has already called the police. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. 1 It is quite unusual in this age . Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesnt object. Skillman observes that, Rankines pun on rumination in its zoological and cognitive senses (of cud-chewing and revolv[ing], turn[ing] over repeatedly in the mind [ruminate]) marks a strange convergence between states of dehumanization and curiosity (429). Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. Citizen: An American Lyric Quotes and Analysis "Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. (That part surprised me.) This decision to use second-person also draws attention to the second-class status of black citizens in the US (Adams 58), or blackness as the second person (Sharma). This reminds the narrator of a medical term "John Henryismfor people exposed to stresses stemming from racism" (16). Rankine describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as you. A child, this character is sitting in class one day when the white girl sitting behind her quietly asks her to lean over so she can copy her test answers. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. Your neighbor has already called the police. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. Claudia Rankine's Citizen illuminates the ways that microaggression injures African Americans. The picture of a deer first appears in Kate Clarks Little Girl (Rankine, 19), a sculpture that grafts the modeled human face of a young girl onto the soft, brown, taxidermied body of an infant caribou (Skillman 428). The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. Best to drive through the moment instead of dwelling on it. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as Claudia Rankine, (born January 1, 1963, Kingston, Jamaica), Jamaican-born American poet, playwright, educator, and multimedia artist whose work often reflected a moral vision that deplored racism and perpetuated the call for social justice. The world says stop that. Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, Yes, and the body has memory. Chingonyi, Kayo. He told me to figure out which choice would take the most courage, and then do . No longer can 'you' abide by these misunderstandings, because you understand them too well. read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. Continuing to detail the experiences of this unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates an instance later in the young womans life, when her friend frequently calls her by the name of her own housekeeper. Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. In the final sections of the book, the second-person protagonist notices that nobody is willing to sit next to a certain black man on the train, so she takes the seat. Complete your free account to request a guide. Not affiliated with Harvard College. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. This dilemma arises frequently for the protagonist, like when a colleague at the university where she teaches complains to her about the fact that his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color. (143). This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. The destination is illusory. They have become a you: You nothing. 9 likes. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be Some of them, though, arent actually all that micro. by Claudia Rankine. She determines that its either because her teacher doesnt care about cheating or, worse, because she never truly saw the protagonist sitting there in the first place. You are told to use the back entrance of her house because this is where patients go to get trauma counseling. In this poem, which is the only poem inCitizen to have no commas, Rankine begins in the school yard and ends with life imprisoned (101). By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen. 1, 2008, pp. He says he will call wherever he wants. Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Nick Laird. Rankine continues to examine the protagonists gravitation toward numbness before abruptly switching to first-person narration on the books final page to recount an interaction she has while lying in bed with her partner. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class., Requesting a new guide requires a free LitCharts account. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Claudia Rankine gives us an act of creativity and illumination that combats the mirror world of unseeing and unseen-ness that is imprinted onto the American psyche.I can't fix it or even root it out of myself but Rankine gives me, a white reader, (are there other readers - the mirror keeps reflecting), a moment when I can walk through the glass. Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetryrepetition, metaphor . We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. Johanning, Cameron. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Essays for Citizen: An American Lyric. 3, 2019, p. 419-457. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. The disembodied heads of the Black subject does not only allude to lynching and captivity, as the 16 sections of the cupboard look like 16 prison cells, but it also represents the way bodies are stacked on top of one another in slave ships (Skillman 447). These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. (including. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. By my middling review, I definitely dont mean to take away anything from. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. In context, the author is referring to the weight of memory, the racial insults, the slights, and the mistreatment by other players. Although this is meant to help avoid misunderstandings, oftentimes too much is understood. The fact that only the hood of the hoodie exists, with the seam rips still evident and the strings still hanging, alludes to the historical lynching of Black people in America, which has erased and dismembered the black body. I repeat what Bill Kerwin reminded me of in his review of this book: At a Trump rally, there is a woman sitting behind him reading a book while he speaks. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. An even more pronouncedly racist moment occurs when the protagonist is in line at Starbucks and the white man standing in front of her calls a group of black teenagers the n-word. The way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. This erasure (Rankine 11, 24, 32, 49, 142) or invisibility (43, 70-72, 82-84) of Black people is also illuminated in the use of second-person pronouns, which displaces the Ithe individualand replaces it with a youa subject. Magnificent. Citizen by Claudia Rankine is an exceptional book which is much deserving of all the awards it has won. This juxtaposition between black space and white space, body and no body, presence and absence, conveys the erasure of Black people on a visual level. You raise your lids. A mixed-media collection of vignettes, poems, photographs, and reproductions of various forms of visual art, Citizen floats in and out of a multiple topics and perspectives. The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. These are called microaggressions. We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. This parallel between erasure and lynching can be seen more clearly when we look at Hulton Archives Public Lynchingphotograph, whose image had been altered by John Lucas (Rankine, 91) (Figure 1). At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. Yes, and leads to a narrow pathway with no forks in the road. The iconic image of American fear. Rankines visual metaphor and allusions to modern-day enslavement is repeated in John Lucas Male II & I(Rankine 96-97), which also frames Black and white subjects and objects in wooden frames (Figure 5). Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. The wearer of the hood no longer exists, and the now empty hood has been cut off or detached from the rest of the body. Rankine writes: we are drowning here / still in the difficultythe water show[ed] [us] no one would come (85). Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an . Reviewed: Citizen: An American Lyric. She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. The protagonist knows that her friend makes this mistake because the housekeeper is the only other black person in her life, but neither of them mention this. "IN CITIZEN, I TRIED TO PICK SITUATIONS AND MOMENTS THAT MANY PEOPLE SHARE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC OCCURRENCE THAT MIGHT ONLY HAPPEN TO ME." Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). 1, 2018, pp. Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people addressable, opening them up to verbal attack by others. Read the Study Guide for Citizen: An American Lyric, Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankines Citizen, Poetry, Politcs, and Personal Reflection: Redefining the Lyric in Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation, Citizen: A Discourse on our Post-Racial Society, View our essays for Citizen: An American Lyric, Introduction to Citizen: An American Lyric, View the lesson plan for Citizen: An American Lyric, View Wikipedia Entries for Citizen: An American Lyric. On the drive back from the movie, the protagonist receives a call from her neighbor, who tells her that theres a sinister looking man walking back and forth in front of her house. Leaning against the wall, they discuss the riots that have broken out in London as a response to the unjustified police killing of a young black man named Mark Duggan. "Jim Crow Rd." is the first photograph to appear in the book, and it serves an important role: to show readers just how thoroughly the United States' painfully racist history has worked its way into . A man in line refers to boisterous teenagers in the Starbucks as niggers. The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. "Citizen: An American Lyric", p.124, Macmillan . The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. While this style of narration positions the reader as [a] racist and [a] recipient of racism simultaneously (Adams 58), therefore placing them directly in the narrative, the use of you also speaks to the invisibility and erasure of Black people (Rankine 70-72). At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. Figure 3. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Figure 1. Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine's Citizen Reading Between Lines of Citizen What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. Rankine sees this type of ambiguity [that] could be diagnosed as dissociation in Serena Williams, whose claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae (Rankine 36) speaks to the kind of psychological disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. . With the sophistication of its dialectical movement, the gravitas of its ethical appeal, and the mercy of its psychological rigor, Claudia Rankine's Citizen combines traditional poetic strains in a new way and passes them on to the reader with replenished vitality. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. When a man knocks over a woman's son in the subway, he just keeps walking. Rankine wants us to look and pay attention to the background of the text, the landscape where these everyday moments of erasure occur. The pronoun barely [holds] the person together (71). Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. Claudia Rankine's National Book Critics Circle award-winning book of poetry and criticism, Citizen: An American Lyric confronts the myriad ways racism preys upon the black psyche. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting, and imprisonment of African-Americans in the white hegemonic society of America. The heads in Cerebral Caverns become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, connecting the slavery of the past to modern-day incarceration. It's an image that lingers in your mind because it is so powerful and emotionally evocative. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. Another sigh. Claudia Rankine's Citizen opens with a sequence of anecdotes, a catalog of racist micro-aggressions and "moments [that] send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs." Citizen as one of the inspirations for her album. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting, and imprisonment of African-Americans in the white hegemonic society of America. The placement of the photograph at the bottom of the page is deliberate, as it makes the empty black space seem even smaller in comparison to the white figures and white space that surrounds it. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. This structure which seems to keep African-Americans in chains harkens all the way back to the trans-Atlantic slave trade (59), where Black people were subjected to the most dehumanizing of white supremacys injuries, chattel slavery (Javadizadeh 487). Analysis Of Citizen By Claudia Rankine. Public Lynchingfrom the Hulton archives. Published in 2014, Citizen combines prose, poetry, and images to paint a provocative portrait of the African American experience and racism in the so-called "post-racial" United States. Rankine narrates another handful of uncomfortable instances in which the unnamed protagonist is forced to quietly endure racism. Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. It was timely fifty years ago. . On campus, another woman remarks that because of affirmative action her son couldn't go to the college that the narrator and the woman's father and grandfather had attended. What did she just do? Javadizadeh, Kamran. A damn hard read but a damn necessary one. Figure 5. Rankine illustrates this theme of erasure and black invisibility in the visual imagery, whose very inclusion in the work speaks to the poetic innovation of Rankines Citizen. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. Rankines small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. This is a poignant powerful work of art. Her son went to another prestigious university instead. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. It wasnt a match, she replies. Rankine will answer . Did you win? her partner asks. You say there's no need to "get all KKK on them, to which he responds "now there you go" (21). The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. 1 Citizen has continued to amass resonance in the years since this essay was first written in 2017, a ; 1 Since its first publication by Graywolf Press in 2014, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric has cleared a remarkable path in terms of acquiring garlands and gongs, making its way onto American poetry booklists and curricula at a dizzying pace. Our, "Sooo much more helpful thanSparkNotes. By talking about her experiences in second-person, Rankine creates a kind of separation between herself and her experiences. Political performance art. As the photographs show Zidane register what Materazzi has said, turn around, and approach him, Rankine provides excerpts from the previously mentioned thinkers, including Frantz Fanons thoughts about the history of discrimination against Algerian people in France. Bella Adams(2017)Black Lives/White Backgrounds: Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyricand Critical Race Theory,Comparative American Studies An International Journal,15:1-2,54-71,DOI:10.1080/14775700.2017.1406734. View Citizen_ An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine.pdf from ENG L499 at Indiana University, Bloomington. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Citizen: An American Lyric. Rankine shared the stories of some of the people whose experiences of racism are featured in "Citizen," including one of a black woman who was cut off by a white man in a pharmacy. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". On a plane, a woman and her daughter are reluctant to sit next to you in the row. No one else is seeking. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a multidimensional work that examines racism in terms of daily microaggressions (comments or actions that subtly express prejudice) and their larger implications. 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