rankine claudia citizen an american lyric

While autotheory remains a genre in search of consensus, Citizen would seem to share the project of other literary works whose depictions of embodied experience are entangled with critical theory. This is especially true when viewing autotheory from the angle of performance. As poet and scholar Evie Shockley notes, most reviews that classify Citizen as something more or other than poetry do so in order to move away from a discussion of form 'into a consideration of the book's 'content.'' Affiliation with autotheory, however, may have the opposite effect of linking the book's relational ethics more directly to its form. It also offers a new perspective on the ethical potential of autotheoretical form, which Lauren Fournier defines as the use of 'embodied experiences as a primary text or raw material through which to theorize, process, and reiterate theory' (Fournier 646). This essay considers what attending to the theoretical concept of 'performativity' alongside a notion of performance more aligned with the theatrical reveals about Citizen's commentary on anti-blackness vis-à-vis its status as a work of autotheory.

Yet Citizen poses certain interpretive challenges that these angles do not fully address. In addition-vis-à-vis its selection for citywide reading programs and school curricula across the country-the book has been widely engaged as an instructive, empathy-generating vehicle that ostensibly explains, per its New York Times review headline, 'How It Feels to Be Black in America' (Bass). An instant omnipresence on bestseller charts, award shortlists, college syllabi, and bookstore tables, Citizen has since been considered by scholarly and popular critics as lyric poetry, as black experimental poetry, as documentary, and as image-text.

However, the book's message was amplified by the #BlackLivesMatter movement following the deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, among others, and captured readers' attention in a moment when grief and outrage over racism's deadly toll sought collective outlet in cultural forms. Citizen insists that anti-blackness persists everywhere, every day in America, making the devastating case that there was nothing unusual about the number of unarmed African Americans killed by police in the months surrounding its release in fall 2014. Depicting violent, exhausting, and iterative experiences of African American racial interpellation through the striking use of second-person address, Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric has been praised by readers as 'brilliant, disabusing' (Chiasson) 'a dazzling expression of the painful double consciousness of black life in America' (Lindgren) and 'necessary in every sense of the word' (Gay).

Rankine claudia citizen an american lyric