Week 10.2: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Reading:
Claudia Rankine, 139-61

Study Questions:
1.  Pages 139-146 include many lines that call back to earlier moments in the book: drowning in the world, the injured body, wait with me, call you out, call out to you, etc. How do these lines resonate with you now as you are reaching the end of the book? What are you thinking and feeling as you read? How have your responses changed since you first read these lines earlier in the book?

2. Discuss the closing of this book and the closing line, “It wasn’t a match. It was a lesson” (159).

 

Week 10.1: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Reading:
Rankine, Citizen, 82-135


Study Questions:
1. Do some quick informal research on the following items:

• Hurricane Katrina Coverage
• Trayvon Martin
• James Craig Anderson
• Jena Six
• Mark Duggan
• Stop-and-Frisk
• Long form birth certificate 
• Mark Duggan
• Zinedine Zidane

Write a sentence about each of these terms. Then, select two of the terms and why you think Rankine decided to write about them in this section.

2.  Most of today's reading consists of scripts for Situation videos that Rankine collaborated on with her husband, the visual artist John Lucas. Up above is one of the videos. Write a paragraph about how the visuals interact with the audio.

Week 9.2: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Reading:
Rankine, Citizen, 69-79

Paper 1 Due

Study Question:
1. Throughout Citizen we have seen Rankine focus her attention on the body. What connections does Rankine make her between words, race, and the body in this section?

Week 9.1: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Reading:
Rankine, Citizen, 41-66

Study Questions:
1. Discuss the role of language in its ability to generate the “hyperinvisibility” that Rankine discusses. Can you give additional examples of how language is used to “exploit” presence? (49)

2. To what extend are we able to “refuse to carry what doesn’t belong to us” (55)? How are these accumulating spotlights of racism impacting you? How do they impact Rankine?

Week 8.2: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Reading:
Rankine, Citizen, 23-37

Study Questions:
1. How does the experience of reading the poems and thinking about the experiences described in Chapter I prepare you for the analytical prose in Chapter II?

2. How does Rankine interpret the career of Serena Williams within the framework of commodified anger”? In other words, why is it “bad sportsmanship” to call out racism? What is Rankine arguing here about the difficulty of speaking up with racism or microaggressions occur? How does this connect to the experiences she describes in Chapter I, for example when her neighbor calls the police because Rankine’s friend is on the phone on the sidewalk?

Week 8.1: Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For her book  Citizen, Rankine won both the PEN Open Book Award and the PEN Literary Award, the NAACP Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was the first book ever to be named a finalist in both the poetry and criticism categories); and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She has taught at Claremont, USC, and now, at Yale. (adapted from her official website)

Reading:

Claudia Rankine, Citizen, 5-19

Study Questions:

1. Analyze the cover art of Citizen and the opening quotation.  

2. Why do you think that Rankine chooses to write in second person? How does hearing “you” feel? How would it feel if the poems were written in first person? Third person?