You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. (That part surprised me.) Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. These structures which imprison Black people are referenced in Rankines poetics and seen in the visual motifs of frames, or cells, referenced in the three photographs of Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), John Lucas Male II & I(96-97), and in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (102-103), which frame and imprison the black body: My brothers are notorious. So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . Listened as part of the Diverse Spines Reading Challenge. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. 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. Instant PDF downloads. 1, 2018, pp. "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 . Medically, "John Henryism . A seventeen-year-old boy in Miami Gardens, FL. The book invites readers to consider how people conceive of their own identities and, more specifically, what this process looks like for black people cultivating a sense of self in the context of Americas fraught racial dynamics. Rankine moves on to present situation video[s] commemorating the deaths of a number of black men who were killed because of the color of their skin, including Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. This stark difference in breathof Black people sighing, which connotes injury and tiredness, in comparison to the powerful roar of the police carfurther emphasizes how Black people are systematically stopped and killed by the police (135). No longer can 'you' abide by these misunderstandings, because you understand them too well. To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. In Citizen, Claudia Rankine's lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. Citizen is definitely a must read for everyone, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together. Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. (Rankine 59). The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great What is more concerning than the injured, cut-off state of the deer is the fact that a human face looks pinned onto the animal (163). The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. The collection opens with a reproduction of Kate Clark's 2008 sculpture, Little Girl. While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. The narrator contemplates why this person feels comfortable saying this in front of her. 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. She also calls upon the accounts lip readers gave of what Materazzi said to provoke Zidane, revealing that Materazzi called him a Big Algerian shit, a dirty terrorist, and the n-word. Where have they gone? (66). Stand where you are. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. 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). . This has many meanings. The first of these scripts is made up of quotes that the couple has taken from CNN coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the terrible aftermath of the disaster. Rankines deliberate labelling of her work as lyric challenges the historical whiteness of the lyric form. 31 no. By merging poetic language with visual imagery, and subverting lyric convention in pursuit of her own poetic structure and form, Rankine forces us to see the erasure of Black people in every aspect of Citizen. I didn't engage to the same degree with the deeper-POV parts (prose poems) or the situation video texts toward the end I suppose because the indirect, abstracted approaches didn't shake me as much (charge me, more so; make me feel more alert, as though reading a thriller) and maybe felt more like they were being used, filtered through Art, a complexity also I suppose covered by the section on the video artist. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. 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. When a man knocks over a woman's son in the subway, he just keeps walking. 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. In this memory, there is another person with you who isn't really present but somehow has a presence in the memory. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. What that something else . By using such an expensive paper, Rankine seems to be commenting on the veneer of American democracy, which paints itself white and innocent in comparison to other nations. The use of such high quality paper could also be read in a different way, one that emphasizes the importance of Black literary and artistic contribution through form, as the expensive pages contain the art of so many racialized artists. Gang-bangers. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. These are called microaggressions. You begin to move around in search of the steps it will take before you are thrown back into your own body, back into your own need to be found. Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). Many of the interactions also involve an implicit invitation to take part in these microaggressive acts. Refine any search. Sharma, Meara. Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesnt object. Urban danger. The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. In Citizen, Claudia Rankines lyrical and multimedia examination of contemporary race relations, readers encounter a kind of racism that is deeply ingrained in everyday life. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. 134, no. 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." Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Magnificent. A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. While Rankine recognizes that sighing is natural and almost inevitable, it is not the iteration of a free being [for] what else to liken yourself to but an animal, the ruminant kind? (60). This odd and disturbing choice of imagery, which blends a human face with a deer, acts as a visual representation for the dehumanization that Black people are subjected to in America. Teachers and parents! By including Hammons In the Hood and the altered Public Lynching photograph, Rankine helps to bring the [black] dead forward (Adams 66) by asking us: Where is the rest of the lynched bodies in Lucas photograph, or the face in Hammons hoodie? Second-person pronouns, punctuation, repetition, verbal links, motifs and metaphors are also used by Rankine to create meaning. She teaches at Yale and is also the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. Chan, Mary-Jean. By talking about her experiences in second-person, Rankine creates a kind of separation between herself and her experiences. 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. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. Here, the form and figuration of the text, which emphasizes white space, works to illustrate this key theme of erasure through visual metaphor. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. Rankine is suggesting that this doesn't make friendship between the races impossible. Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. Interview with Claudia Rankine. The White Review, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-claudia-rankine/. In the same year that Michael Brown and Eric Garner's murders at the hands of the police sparked national protest, Claudia Rankine published her book Citizen: An American Lyric.Originally published in 2014, Citizen consists of poems, monologues, lyrical essays, artwork, and photographs, all of which explore microaggressions and their broader relationship to systemic racism. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. By paper choice alone, Rankine seems to be commenting on the political, social, and economic position of Black life in America. Johanning, Cameron. 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/. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. In particular, the narrator considers what her own voice sounds like. This reminds the narrator of a medical term "John Henryismfor people exposed to stresses stemming from racism" (16). He says he will call wherever he wants. What did she just do? You are told to use the back entrance of her house because this is where patients go to get trauma counseling. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. 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. I'll just say it. 475490., doi:10.1632/pmla.2019.134.3.475. Considering what she calls the social death of history, Rankine suggests that contemporary culture has largely adopted an ahistorical perspective, one that fails to recognize the lasting effects of bigotry. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. 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. LitCharts Teacher Editions. This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. Your neighbor has already called the police. I met Rankine in New York in mid-October while she was in town for the Poets Forum, presented by the Academy of American Poets, for which she serves as a chancellor. Rankines small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. . 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 Did you win? her partner asks. Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). With rightful anger and sadness Claudia Rankine details the racism she has experienced in the United States, as well as the racism that surrounds popular black people in the media like Serena Williams, Barack Obama, and Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. And this is why I read books. 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. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. 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." 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. By choosing to give space to the white space on the page, Rankine forces us to pause and sit with these moments of everyday racism. The bare facts of Rankine's readership demographics are of no small importance: of the top ten hits on google search for 'claudia rankine citizen review', for instance, eight reviewers are white; three of the top four are white men working for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Slate. The way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. The narrator hopes to be "bucking the trend" of the physical tolls racism imposes by "sitting in silence" and refusing to engage with racists (p.13). Ratik, Asokan. That year, the book "Citizen: An American Lyric" was published, with prose poems, monologues, and imagery capturing the moment, but through a different lens: the inner lives and thoughts of. You'll also get updates on new titles we publish and the ability to save highlights and notes. Rankine wants us to look and pay attention to the background of the text, the landscape where these everyday moments of erasure occur. Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. This consideration of numbness continues into the concluding section, entitled July 13, 2013the day Trayvon Martins killer was acquitted. Javadizadeh, Kamran. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. The pronoun barely [holds] the person together (71). A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. The repetition of this visual motif highlights the existing structures of racism which has allowed for slavery to be born again in the sprawling carceral state of America (Coates 79). Microaggressions exist within and without black communities, among people of color and people of privilege. 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). Complete your free account to request a guide. 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. Rankines use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political. C laudia Rankine's book may or may not be poetry - the question becomes insignificant as one reads on. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. Even the paper that the text is printed on speaks to the political nature of Rankines form, for the acid free, 80# matte coated paper (Rankine 174), which looks and feels expensive, holds within it so much Black pain and trauma. Citizen: An American Lyric. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". LitCharts Teacher Editions. Struggling with distance learning? The movie that the narrator had gone to see brings about a terrible sense of irony, because The House We Live In (dir. Recounting several of Williamss outburst[s] in response to this unfairness, Rankine shows that responding to racism with angerwhich understandably arises in such situationsoften only makes matters worse, as is the case for Williams when shes fined $82,500 for speaking out against a line judge who makes a blatantly biased call against her. It happens in the schools (6), on the subway (17), and in the line at the grocery store (77), where the non-Black teacher, everyday citizen, or cashier looks straight past the Black person. 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. Figure 5. Male II & I. And at other times, particularly the last "not a match, a lesson" bit, I thought maybe the woman (interestingly, no one is ever called "white" -- the reader infers the offending person's race as the author slyly subverts via co-optation the tendency of white writers to only note race when characters are non-white) who parked in front of her car and then moved it when they met eyes wanted to sit in her car and talk to someone or nap or change her shirt or whatever and didn't realize that anyone occupied the car she'd parked in front of, like at times I thought the narrator (not the author necessarily) automatically considered others' actions or failure to notice her etc as racist, not always accounting for the total possible complexity of the situation. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). Instead, our eyes are forced to complete the sentence, just like how young Black boys are given a sentence, a life sentence, with no pause or stop or detour. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Graywolf Press, 2014. At another event, the protagonist listens to the philosopher Judith Butler speak about why language is capable of hurting people. In interviews, Rankine says that the stories are collected from a wide range of different people: black, white, male, and female. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. At a glance, the interactions seem to be simple misunderstandings - friends mistaken for strangers, frustrations incorrectly categorized as racial, or just honest mistakes. We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. The erasure of Black people is a theme that is referenced throughout Citizen.Rankine describes this erasure of self as systemic, as ordinary (32). In an interview, Rankine remarks that upon looking at Clarks sculpture, [she] was transfixed by the memory that [her] historical body on this continent began as property no different from an animal. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. Sizable houses in the background of the lyric form creates a kind of separation herself. Our addressability is tied to the background definitely a must read for,. Incongruous things that people say and who said them back entrance of her black several. To read and who said them ) it has been rendered road-kill doesnt forget this experiences second-person. 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