Where have they gone? (66). 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. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. When she objects to his use of this word, he acts like its not a big deal. Rankine speaks with NPR's Lynn Neary about where the national conversation about race stands today. 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 stresses the importance of remembering because forgetting is part of the erasure. And this is why I read books. When a man knocks over a woman's son in the subway, he just keeps walking. 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." 9 likes. 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. Citizen: An American Lyric Quotes and Analysis "Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Jamaican-born author Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, two plays, and numerous video collaborations. 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. Johanning, Cameron. 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. 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. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. 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. ", After reading Citizen, its hard not to hear Rankines voice as I ride the subway, walk around NYC, or even pick up other books. PDF downloads of all 1699 LitCharts literature guides, and of every new one we publish. By paper choice alone, Rankine seems to be commenting on the political, social, and economic position of Black life in America. While she highlights a vast number of stories that illustrate the hate crimes that have occurred in the United States during the 21st century, the James Craig Anderson case is prevalent because his heartbreaking story is known by few individuals throughout . 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. A piercing and perceptive book of poetry about being black in America. 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). In this memory, a secondary memory is evoked, but this time it is the author's memory. Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. Until African-Americans are seen as human beings worthy of an I, they will continue to be a you in Americaunable to enjoy all the rights of their citizenship. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. A cough launches another memory into your consciousness. Jenn Northington. 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). 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. 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). 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. 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 next situation video that Rankine presents is about the 2006 soccer World Cup, when Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi, who verbally provoked him. 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. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. These are called microaggressions. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. Furthermore, Black people like James Craig Anderson are killed on the road, squashed by a pickup truck (92-95). It wasnt a match, she replies. They have not been to prison. Rivetingly worth it for the Serena Williams section and the slices of life in the first half that so effectively/efficiently dramatize overt and less obvious instances of racism. 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. 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? Yes, and it's raining. A friend called you by the name of her black housekeeper several times. As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. The artist speaking to the protagonist is white, and he asks her if shes going to write about Duggan. Figure 3. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. By my middling review, I definitely dont mean to take away anything from. 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). SHOTTS: It is an utterly amazing honor to work with Claudia. Predictably, my finger hovers over sections that are more like prose than poetry ( that bit on Serena was a highlight). Chingonyi, Kayo. Black people are dying and all of it is happening in the white spaces of America. Back in the memory, you are remembering the sounds that the body makes, especially in the mouth. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. 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. Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. Still, the interaction leaves her with a dull headache and wishing she didnt have to pretend that this sort of behavior is acceptable. Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people addressable, opening them up to verbal attack by others. Not only is this poetic novel a vision of her world through her eyes, Rankine uses the experiences . Biss, Eula. She joined me at The Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College in New York City. 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. 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/. The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. Amid historic times, Claudia Rankine feels a deep sense of obligation. This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . 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. Hoping he was well-intentioned, the woman answered . In response, the protagonist turns the question back around, asking why he doesnt write about it. 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. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. What did she just do? 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. 137163., doi:10.1017/S0021875817000457. In the book Citizen, Claudia Rankine speaks on these particular subjects of stereotyping deeply. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric. Read it all in one flow. You exhaust yourself looking into the blue light. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. In the very last story, the racist realization is shouted down on the narrator. 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. The world says stop that. 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). 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 takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. This erasure would also happen on a larger scale, where whole Black communities would be forgotten about, abandoned in the crisis that was Hurricane Katrina (82-84). 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. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . 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. Rankine challenges this norm in more than one way. 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. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of. Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. This is especially problematic because it becomes very difficult to address bigotry when people and society at large refuse to acknowledge its existence. When the clerk points out that the woman was next in line, the man responded, "Oh, I didn't see you.". Like "Again Serena's frustrations, her disappointments, exist within a system you understand not to try to understand in any fair-minded way because to do so is to understand the erasure of the self as systemic, as ordinary. 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. (143). This makes Rankines use of the lyric form political in its subversive nature. Citizen by Claudia Rankine Themes Acceptance Identity Rankine argues that African Americans have had to sweep aside these microagressions and to accept how they are treated in order to be a good citizen, to survive, to not be the targets of law enforcement. 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. Javadizadeh, Kamran. The therapist is yelling for you to leave, and you manage to tell her that you have an appointment. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. The brevity of description illuminates how quickly these moments of erasure occur and its dispersion throughout the work emphasizes its banality. The frames, which create 35 cells on either page, also allude to Black imprisonment, as the subjects appear to be behind wooden prison bars (Rankine 96-97). Ratik, Asokan. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. She takes situations that happen on a daily basis, real life tragedies and acts in the media to analyze and bring awareness to the subtle and not so subtle forms of racism. He told me to figure out which choice would take the most courage, and then do . Anyway, I read this is a single sitting in bed and recommend it to everyone. In the photograph, there are no black bodies hanging, just the space where the two black bodies once were (Chan 158). Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). 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 "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. Hearing this, the protagonist wonders why her friend feels comfortable saying this to her, but she doesnt object. The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. A picture appears on the next page interrupting Rankine's poem, something that the reader will get used to as the text progresses. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. View Citizen_ An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine.pdf from ENG L499 at Indiana University, Bloomington. 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. "Those years of and before me and my brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us, its roots our limbs, a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. You can't put the past behind you. No, this is just a friend of yours, you explain to your neighbor, but it's too late. Trump is of course unapologetically and infamously racist against various races (and religions, women, and so on), so the woman behind Trump uses the opportunity to read this anti-racist book, knowing it will get national coverage; we see the title, we check it out: Powerful political commentary. 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. "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. She envisioned her craft as a means to create something vivid, intimate, and transparent. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. 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. These two different examples illustrate various scales of erasure. ISBN 978-1-55597-690-3 Format Paperback It shows the back of a stop sign with a street sign on top labeled 'Jim Crow Rd'. This book is necessary and timely. Eugene Jarecki, 2003) is about racial injustice. She teaches at Yale and is also the founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute. As Michelle Alexander writes in. A hoodie. Claudia Rankine (2014). From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. 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. Schlosser, using Citizen, redefines citizenship through the metaphor of injury (6). Both this series and Citizen combine intentional and unintentional racism to awaken the viewers to such injustices present in their own lives. 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. 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). 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 is definitely a must read for everyone, especially if one day we hope to annihilate racism all together. Rankine seems to ask this question again in a later poem, when she says: Have you seen their faces? Claudia Rankine's contemporary piece, Citizen: An American Lyric exposes America's biggest and darkest secret, racism, to its severity. In keeping with this indication that its difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called Jim Crow Rd. by the photographer Michael David Murphy. Claudia Rankine's acclaimed 2014 poetry book "Citizen" was a potent and incisive meditation on race. This structure becomes physical in Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), which displays 32 plastered heads kept in a cupboard made of wood and glass (Rankine 165) (Figure 4). You raise your lids. The rain begins to fall. Suddenly you smell good again, like in Catholic school. Refine any search. The general expectation, Rankine upholds, is that people of color must simply move on from their anger, letting racist remarks slide in the name, Claudia Rankines Citizen provides a nuanced look at the many ways in which humanitys racist history brings itself to bear on the present. Time and Distance Overcome. The Iowa Review, vol. Definitions and examples of 136 literary terms and devices. Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Nick Laird. (Rankine 59). 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. -Graham S. Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. "My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." Returning to the unnamed protagonist, Rankine narrates a scene in which the protagonist is talking to a fellow artist at a party in England. Complete your free account to request a guide. Yes, and leads to a narrow pathway with no forks in the road. What that something else . The route is often . GradeSaver, 15 August 2016 Web. Yes, and it utilizes many of the techniques of poetryrepetition, metaphor . Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). 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. She also writes about racist profiling in a script entitled Stop-and-Frisk, providing a first-person account by an unidentified narrator who is pulled over for no reason and mistreated by the police, all because he is a black man who fit[s] the description of a criminal for whom the police are supposedly looking. A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. 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. Sometimes you sigh. 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. Courtesy of John Lucas. 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. 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. 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 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). 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. The physiological costs are high. Chan, Mary-Jean. Rankine transitions to an examination of how the protagonist and other people of color respond to a constant barrage of racism. It's more than a book. "The rain this mourning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. 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). He is, the neighbor says, talking to himself. 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. Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric ( 2014a) and its precursor Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric ( 2004) have become two of the most galvanizing books of poetry published this century. In this moment, the protagonist realizes that being black in a white-dominated world doesnt make her feel invisible, but hypervisible. This, in turn, accords with the author Zora Neale Hurstons line that she feels most colored when shes thrown against a sharp white background. These thoughts, however, dont ease the painthe persistent headachethat the protagonist feels on a daily basis because of the racist way people treat her. 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). Its buried in you; its turned your flesh into its own cupboard (63). You need your glasses what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. 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. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. 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. 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. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Rankine will answer . The question, "How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?" 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). At Like in Sections IV and III, Rankine puts special focus on the body and its potentials to be made known. Claudia Rankin's novel Citizen explores what it means to be at home in one's country, to feel accepted as an equal in status when surrounded by others. Look at the cover. According to Rankine, the story about the man who had to hire a black member to his faculty happened to a white person. The mass incarceration of Black people, which was made explicit in the content and emphasized in the form, is reinforced in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (Rankine 102-103), which features the same young Black boy in each of the three photographs (Figure 3). It was timely fifty years ago. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of .
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