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. A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. 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. At this point, Citizen becomes more abstract and poetic, as Rankine writes scripts for situation video[s] she has made in collaboration with her partner, John Lucas, who is a visual artist. She writes in second person: "you." Urban danger. Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. 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. The thing is, most people who commit these microaggressions don't realize they are making them yet they have an accumulated effect on the psyche. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. 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. More books than SparkNotes. Claudia Rankine zeros in on the microaggressions experienced by non-white people, particularly black females, in the United States. This emphasis on injury, of being a wounded animal (59, 65), all work in conjunction with the first image of the deer. He says he will call wherever he wants. Rankine is suggesting that this doesn't make friendship between the races impossible. It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. In an article discussing the Black Lives/White Backgrounds of Rankines Citizen, Bella Adams states: the blank and typically white backgrounds on which Rankines words and images appear (69) is representative of the hierarchical racial formation that is rendered nearly invisible by its colour (white) and positioning (background) in the contemporary, so-called colour-blind or post-racial United States (55). 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). Charging. Citizen: An American Lyric. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. View Citizen - Claudia Rankine (Full Text PDF, searchable).pdf from ENGLISH SL Y2 at Quabbin Regional High School. Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. And this is why I read books. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. Coates refers to these two institutions as arms of the same beastfear and violence were the weaponry of both (33). 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 is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. In this instance, the black body becomes even more animal-like. The repetition of the same image highlights the racial profiling of Black men: And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description (Rankine 105, 106, 108, 109). She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. A cough launches another memory into your consciousness. 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. Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." The erratum to the chapter is available at 10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_14. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. 1, 2018, pp. Suduiko, Aaron ed. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. African-Americans are still experiencing hardships every day that stem from slavery such as racial profiling, and stereotyping. 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. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. Javadizadeh, Kamran. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. Citizen: An American Lyric essays are academic essays for citation. One example is the employer who says he had to hire "a person of color when there are so many great writers out there" (15). A seventeen-year-old boy in Miami Gardens, FL. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. It's raining outside and the leaves on the trees are more vibrant because of it. 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). A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. Figure 1. Perhaps this dissociation, seen in the literariness of Rankines poetics and use of you, speaks to the kind of erasure of self that happens when you experience racism every day. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. 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. ISBN: 978-1-55597-690-3CHAPTER 1 When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Rankine describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. 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). The visual motifs of frames and cells illustrate the way racist ideology, which endorsed slavery, continues to keep Black people in chains in modern-day America. Political performance art. Refine any search. 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. In the beginning of this poem, Rankine asks you to recall a time when you felt absolutely nothing. I can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. 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. Struggling with distance learning? 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. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as "you.". Skillman, Nikki. But then again I suppose it's a really strong point that her consciousness is so occupied by overt racism that she sees subtle racism everywhere -- "because white men cant police their imaginations, black men are dying," particularly -- even where it likely may not exist. LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. At Like in Sections IV and III, Rankine puts special focus on the body and its potentials to be made known. Figure 4. In addition to questioning unmarked whiteness, Claudia Rankine's Citizen contains all the hallmarks of experimental writing: borrowed text, multiple or fractured voices, constraint-based systems of creation, ekphrastic cataloging, and acute engagement with visual art. Rankine repeats: flashes, a siren, the stretched-out-roar (105, 106, 107) three times. The celebrated poet and playwright is preparing to deliver a three-part lecture series at the University of Chicago during a pivotal moment: Russia has invaded Ukraine; the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world; and the United States, she said, still teeters between fascism and fragile notions of democracy. 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. Unable to let herself show anger, she suffers in private. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. She teaches at Yale and is also the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. Instead of following the woman to ask why she did this, the protagonist took her tennis racket and went to the court. LitCharts Teacher Editions. 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. "I am so sorry, so, so sorry" is her response (23). We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. Read it all in one flow. In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. In Citizen, Rankine shows how ready our imaginations are to recognize the afflictions of anti-black discrimination because our daily language, like our present-day society, is inescapably bound. What is most striking about the visual image is the omission of a human subject. Rankine narrates another handful of uncomfortable instances in which the unnamed protagonist is forced to quietly endure racism. For Rankine, there is no escaping the path from school to prison. 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. Whether Rankine is talking about tennis or going out to dinner, or spinning words until youre not sure which direction youre facing, there is strength, anger, and a call for white readers like myself to see whats in front of us and do better, be better. Page forty-one describes an incident about a friend rushing to meet with another friend in the "distant neighborhood of Santa Monica . 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. You nobody. 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 voice is a symbol for the self. Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. When a man knocks over a woman's son in the subway, he just keeps walking. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. is so apt, especially for those of us living in multicultural environments. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of the written word. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). Sometimes you sigh. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. 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. The next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. In disjointed and figurative writing, Rankine creates a sense of desperation and inequity, depicting what it feels like to belong to one of the many black communities along the Gulf Coastcommunities that national relief organizations all but ignored and ultimately failed to properly serve after the hurricane devastated the area and left many people homeless. Some of them, though, arent actually all that micro. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on ones self-conception. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by 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. Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. Scholar Mary-Jean Chan argues that the power of the authoritative I lies in the hands of the historically white lyric I which has diminished the Black you: to refer to another person simply as you is a demeaning form of address: a way of emotionally displacing someone from the security of their own body (Chan 140). "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". Chan, Mary-Jean. A hoodie. Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. You can't put the past behind you. This all culminates in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy(Rankine 102-103), which repeats the visual motif of bars or cells, by having the same Black boy in three separate boxes (Figure 3). When you look around only you remain. Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). Citizen: An American Lyric Summary. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. 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. ", After reading Citizen, its hard not to hear Rankines voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. The pronoun barely [holds] the person together (71). I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. 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. 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/. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. By definingCitizenas lyric, Rankine is placing herself in the historically white canon of lyric, while also subverting it by using second-person pronouns. 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. 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). A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. The destination is illusory. The narrator assures her: "The world is wrong. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. 1, 2008, pp. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. It is agonizing to display our flayed skin to the salt of another day. 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. The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. The world says stop that. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. She says the things that we have all said and describes situations we have all been in. To see so many people moved and transformed by her work and her vision is something that should give us all hope. 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. In a way, Citizen becomes a modern manifestation of Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote about the United States from a French perspective in 1835 in Democracy in America. This has many meanings. The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. Claudia Rankine's Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap.It's a sequel of sorts to Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), sharing its subtitle (An American Lyric) and ambidextrous approach: Both books combine poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, words and . The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). Get help and learn more about the design. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. The structure, which breaks up the poetics with white space and visual imagery, uses space and mixed media to convey these themes. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. 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. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. 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 therapist is yelling for you to leave, and you manage to tell her that you have an appointment. In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Furthermore, Black people like James Craig Anderson are killed on the road, squashed by a pickup truck (92-95). 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. It is no longer a black subject, or black object (93)it has been rendered road-kill. Did you win? her partner asks. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. All day blue burrows the atmosphere. Teachers and parents! In their fight against the weight of nonexistence (Rankine 139), Black people do not have the authority of an I. The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. 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. 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. You can also submit your own questions for Claudia Rankine on our Google form. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Struggling with distance learning? Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. 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. The lack of separation between clauses creates a sense of anxiety as there is no pause in our readingRankine does not allow us breath. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Download chapter PDF. For instance, when she and her partner go to a movie one night, they ask their frienda black manto pick up their child from school. The separation of the Black and white subjects acts as a visual metaphor for the racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, as the Black and white subjects are separatednot only by the wooden frame of the image, but by the page itself. The collection opens with a reproduction of Kate Clark's 2008 sculpture, Little Girl. It is part of a 3-part PBS documentary series called "RACE - The Power of an Illusion. Whereas Citizen focuses on the minute-to-minute racism of everyday life, this documentary series focuses on systematized racial inequalities. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. As Michelle Alexander writes in. Most important poetry book of the year. In her book-length poem "Citizen," from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American.Her focus fell on what it means to be erased . 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. A relevant question might be, talented . The childhood memories are particularly interesting because they give the reader a sense of otherness right from the start. This metaphor becomes even more complex when analyzing the way Rankine describes the stopping-and-frisking of Black people by the police. 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