Changing our schedule up a little bit around the Thanksgiving holiday gives us a chance to spend one day looking at one of this year's most celebrated and controversial books, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (Greywolf), which has just been shortlisted for the National Book Award and will probably also make the lists for the other two big annual literary prizes (the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award) as well. Here's the NBA citation, which 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.
We'll be reading the book's first and third sections, which you can find in PDF format here. There are also excerpts from Citizen available on the Poetry Foundation website, the Amazon preview of the book, and the Academy of American Poets website, along with the reading below at the Split This Rock poetry festival. If you like what you read here, definitely go get the book — unlike some of our other texts this term you can probably pick it up at your local Barnes and Noble or Joseph-Beth — which promises to be one of this year's very best poetry releases.
Addendum: here's another video of Rankine and Robin Coste Lewis reading from and discussing their work that was just posted last week:
Another addendum: PennSound just added Rankine's recent appearance on Between the Covers, a literary radio program on Portland's KBOO-FM. Listen here.
Additionally, here are a few supplemental texts that will provide more selections from the book and some useful contextualization:
- "Blackness Visible," Jonathan Farmer reviews Citizen in Slate
- "On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson" by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker
- Dan Chiasson discusses the book in The New Yorker
- Lauren Berlant interviews Rankine in BOMB
- Shaelyn Smith reviews the book in The Rumpus
- Timothy Liu reviews the book in Coldfront
- The Los Angeles Times reviews the book
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