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. LitCharts Teacher Editions. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. And this ugliness is some of what being an American citizen means. 31 no. Rankine challenges this norm in more than one way. Amid historic times, Claudia Rankine feels a deep sense of obligation. 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). Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. 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). Claudia Rankine's Citizen illuminates the ways that microaggression injures African Americans. Rankines deliberate omission of the commas is powerful. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. (84-85); Did you see their faces? (86). The structure, which breaks up the poetics with white space and visual imagery, uses space and mixed media to convey these themes. 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. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on ones self-conception. Struggling with distance learning? 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). 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 natural response to injustice is anger, but Rankine illustrates that this response isnt always viable for people of color, since letting frustration show often invites even more mistreatment. Each word is a lyrical tribute to Black Americans and all that isn't shouted out on a daily basis. 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. Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetryrepetition, metaphor . Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. (143). 52, no. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . Instant PDF downloads. Rankines use of form, visual imagery, and metaphor are not only used to emphasize key themes of erasure, disembodiment, systemic hunting, and the mass incarceration of Black people, but it also works to construct the history of Black citizenship from the time of slavery to Jim Crow, to modern-day mass incarceration. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Ta-Nehisi Coates, journalist and author of Between the World and Me (2015),argues that: The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Rankines use of form goes beyond informing the contentthe form is also political. Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. It just often makes that friendship painful. Courtesy of Radcliffe Bailey and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. featured health poetry Post navigation. The destination is illusory. Figure 3. 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. 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. Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. Although this is meant to help avoid misunderstandings, oftentimes too much is understood. She's published several collections of poetry and also plays. The artist speaking to the protagonist is white, and he asks her if shes going to write about Duggan. The route is often . So much racism is unconscious and springs from imagined . Ms. Rankine said that "part of documenting the micro-aggressions is to understand where the bigger, scandalous aggressions come from.". Your neighbor has already called the police. 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. Sharma, Meara. I Am Invested in Keeping Present the Forgotten Bodies.. Believer Magazine, 28 June 2020, believermag.com/logger/2014-12-10-i-am-invested-in-keeping-present-the-forgotten/. It's the thing that opens out to something else. ", 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. Her son went to another prestigious university instead. Feeling awkward, the protagonist tells her friend that he should take his calls in the backyard next time. The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. 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. I can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why. 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. Even though it will be obvious that the girl behind her is cheating, the protagonist obliges by leaning over, wondering all the while why her teacher hasnt noticed. Share Claudia Rankine quotations about language, past and feelings. Public Lynchingfrom the Hulton archives. When you look around only you remain. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Placed right after the Jena Six poem, the images allude to the trappings of Black boys in the two institutions of schools and prison shown in the images double entendre. From this description, it is clear that Rankine sees the I as a symbol for a human being, for she later states: the I has so much power; its insane (71). Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. 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. 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. I think this is probably excellent and I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be I am inept at appreciating poetry. The voice is a symbol for the self. Oxford Dictionary defines the word "citizen" as "a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized." Rankine challenges this definition in two ways. You take to wearing sunglasses inside. Its rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many. 137163., doi:10.1017/S0021875817000457. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. In response, the protagonist turns the question back around, asking why he doesnt write about it. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. You raise your lids. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. 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. Rankine writes, You cant put the past behind you. Race is something we Americans still have not gotten right. Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. This reminds you of a conversation contrasting the pros and cons of sentences beginning with yes, and or yes, but. Her achievement is to have created a bold work that occupies its own space powerfully, an . 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. A hoodie. Hoping he was well-intentioned, the woman answered . A neighbor calls while you are watching the film The House We Live In to say that "a menacing black guy" (20) is walking around your house. 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. 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. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine, is a compilation of poems and writings explaining the problems with society's complacency towards racism. "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. By utilizing form, visual imagery, and poetry, Rankine enables us to see the systemic oppression of Black people by the state. Rankine speaks with NPR's Lynn Neary about where the national conversation about race stands today. 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. Refine any search. Interview with Claudia Rankine. The White Review, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-claudia-rankine/. The route is . This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. 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. 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). A picture appears on the next page interrupting Rankine's poem, something that the reader will get used to as the text progresses. Rankine describes these everyday events of erasure in small blocks of black text, each on its own white page. 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). 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. Rankine believes that Black people are not sick, / [they] are injured (143). 1, 2018, pp. Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine's Citizen Reading Between Lines of Citizen 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. Unsurprisingly, the protagonist is right. Struggling with distance learning? Suduiko, Aaron ed. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor." (Citizen, 1) - Section I The rain begins to fall. The emptinessthe lack of a corpse or a live body or faceis a literal representation of the erasure of African-Americans. Rankine illuminates this paradox in order to question the concept of citizenship. 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). View Citizen - Claudia Rankine (Full Text PDF, searchable).pdf from ENGLISH SL Y2 at Quabbin Regional High School. Stand where you are. 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). It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. Below are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month. What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. Her gripping accounts of racism, through prose and poetry, moved me deeply. Chan, Mary-Jean. 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. The collection opens with a reproduction of Kate Clark's 2008 sculpture, Little Girl. The erasure of Black people is a theme that is referenced throughout Citizen.Rankine describes this erasure of self as systemic, as ordinary (32). Clearly - from the blurb and the plaudits - this is an 'important work' - and my failure to 'get it' is a failure to police my mind (or something). These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. 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. 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. LitCharts Teacher Editions. You see Venus move in and put the gorilla effect on. dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. 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). In Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine deconstructs racism and reconstructs it as metaphor (Rankine, 5). The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. In particular, she considers the effect anger has on an individual, illustrating the frustrating conundrum many people of color experience when they encounter small instances of bigotry (often called microaggressions) and are expected to simply let these things go. The way the content is organized, Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. No, this is just a friend of yours, you explain to your neighbor, but it's too late. Anyway, I read this is a single sitting in bed and recommend it to everyone. The subject matter is explicit, yet the writing possesses a self-containment, whether in verse [] Rankine is suggesting that this doesn't make friendship between the races impossible. The therapist is yelling for you to leave, and you manage to tell her that you have an appointment. 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. Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesnt object. Its various realities-'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life-are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. In the photograph, there are no black bodies hanging, just the space where the two black bodies once were (Chan 158). She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. 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. At Like in Sections IV and III, Rankine puts special focus on the body and its potentials to be made known. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. She tells him she was killing time in the parking lot by the local tennis courts that day when a woman parked in the spot facing her car but, upon seeing the protagonist sitting across from her, put her car in reverse and parked elsewhere. 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. 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). Rankine stays with the unnamed protagonist, who in response to racist comments constantly asks herself things like, What did he just say? and Did I hear what I think I heard? The problem, she realizes, is that racism is hard to cope with because before people of color can process instances of bigotry, they have to experience them. 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. The same structures from the past exist today, but perhaps it has become less obvious, as seen in the almost invisible frames of Weems photograph. 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. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. Short on words, but every one counts and rings with purpose. Rankine writes: we are drowning here / still in the difficultythe water show[ed] [us] no one would come (85). Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). 3, 2019, p. 419-457. 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). 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). Teachers and parents! This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. 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. (Rankine 59). 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 this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. 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. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. 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. Complete your free account to request a guide. What did he say? The narrator contemplates why this person feels comfortable saying this in front of her. Complete your free account to request a guide. It was a thing hunted and the hunting continues on a certain level (Skillman 429). 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." At one point, she attends a reading by a humorist who implies that its common for white people to laugh at racist jokes in private, adding that most people wouldnt laugh at this kind of joke if they were out in public where black people might overhear them. 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). Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. Using frame-by-frame photographs that show the progression leading to the headbutt, Rankine quotes a number of writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Maurice Blanchot, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, and James Baldwin. Rankines use of the second-person you also illuminates another kind of erasure, where dissociation becomes another kind of disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. Figure 5. He is, the neighbor says, talking to himself. 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. 134, no. She joined me at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City. 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 Section I Summary and Analysis". Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. But even Tocqueville could not estimate the extent to which microaggressions would come to rule the lives of many in the states. Download chapter PDF. 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. We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. Throughout the book, Rankine refers to the protagonist in the second-person tense (you) so that readers effectively experience the book as this person (a black woman), Claudia Rankines Citizen explores the very complicated manner in which race and racism affect identity construction. Figure 2. As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. 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. And I enjoyed most of it but my caveat needs to be pushing image... Can only point feebly at bits I liked without having the language to say why,. They 're like having in-class notes for every important quote on LitCharts, who response! The image is that each photograph looks like both a School photo and a mug.! Text plus a side-by-side modern translation of image down, crushing the small Black space Als - whose memoir., Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury ( 6 ) objects to his use of this,... Present the Forgotten Bodies.. 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