From the beginning of the book, the reader is involved in the text through Rankine’s use of the second-person “you,” making the personal universal: “You are twelve attending Sts. But that is what makes Rankine’s work beautiful, tragic, profound: in describing African American experience, Rankine strives not to “make it new” (as the modernists would have it), but to make it legible - to articulate the contradictory state of invisibility and hypervisibility, of aggressions and microaggressions, that black citizens endure daily in a society that continues to position them as “other.” In this sense Rankine treads familiar territory (after all, one can hardly claim that racial injustice is a new phenomenon in the US) in an unfamiliar way, letting form reflect content such that a reader can feel the psychological toll of black citizenship in this country, a country built upon the historical exploitation of black bodies.Ĭitizen is structured as a collection of lived experiences - whether the author’s, or those of her friends or fellow black Americans, is unclear and perhaps unimportant - interspersed with postcolonial theory, excerpts from the news and pop culture, and artwork. The subject matter in Claudia Rankine’s hybrid prose-poetry book Citizen is nothing new. ON CITIZEN: AN AMERICAN LYRIC BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
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