Sunday, February 19, 2017

Weeks 7–8: Claudia Rankine's "Citizen: An American Lyric"


We're following up Maggie Nelson's Bluets with a book that all too perfectly encapsulates our nation's fragmented zeitgeist and which, for that reason, is one of the most universally-lauded books in recent memory: Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (Greywolf). Citizen was nominated for two of the three top literary prizes — the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award — winning the latter (FYI: the Pulitzer is the third); it also won the PEN Center USA award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, an NAACP Image Award, and the UK's Forward Prize. Finally, like our other two authors, Rankine is a 2016 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius" Grant. She is using her $625,000 prize to found the Racial Imaginary Institute, which, per a recent article in the Guardian, will be:
a "presenting space and a think tank all at once" where artists and writers can really wrestle with race. She wants it to be a "space which allows us to show art, to curate dialogues, have readings, and talk about the ways in which the structure of white supremacy in American society influences our culture."
As the retrospective articles on 30 Rock that we read a few weeks ago attest, America briefly allowed itself to be comforted by the thought that we had reached a "post-racial" state after the groundbreaking election of President Barack Obama. The past eight years — marred by countless acts of racially-motivated violence, including the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, the Charleston Nine, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Cincinnati's own Samuel DuBose, among far too many others — has demonstrated that woefully, that's not the case. Taking that as a foundation, it's easy to understand why Rankine's book has be so eagerly embraced by audiences desperately searching for answers, or at least perspectives, in these troubled times. Rankine's NBA citation succinctly sums up exactly why everyone is talking about this book:
In Citizen, Claudia Rankine recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV — everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.
Born and raised in Jamaica, Rankine earned both a BA and MFA in the US and has published five volumes of poetry (which have become increasingly multimodal and genre-bending) over the past twenty years. With Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) — an ambitious book that intermingled America's long history of racial injustice, post-9/11 terror paranoia, media manipulation, and the author's own struggles with depression in the face of all these things — Rankine gained widespread attention for her considerable talents. As its subtitle suggests, Citizen continues the mission of Don't Let Me Be Lonely, bringing her focus to present-day tragedies that have filled our news cycle in recent years.

Here's a breakdown for the three classes we'll spend with Citizen:

Friday, February 24: parts I–III
Monday, February 27: IV–V (up to Jena Six, ending on pg. 103)
Wednesday, March 1: V (Stop-and-Frisk)–end





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