![]() ![]() And in the book’s most powerful passages, Rankine reports from the site of her own body, detailing the racist comments she’s been subjected to, the “jokes,” the judgments. ![]() Citizen guides us from spectacle to spectacle, from a consideration of Serena Williams’s career and the racist taunting she has endured to a beautifully reproduced photograph of Kate Clark’s Little Girl, a sculpture of a hoofed woman from an elegy for Trayvon Martin to Carrie Mae Weems’s Blue Black Boy, in which three identical blue-hued prints of a boy are presented side by side, one labeled BLUE, one BLACK, one BOY. Its pages are slick and pearly, and the full-color images-paintings, TV screenshots, photographs-give it the feel of a gallery catalogue, which, in a way, it is. But where Lonely was jangly and capacious, an effort to pin down the mood of a particular moment-the paranoia of post-9/11 America and the racial targeting of black and brown men in those years- Citizen’s project is more oblique, more mysterious.įor the book is, first of all, a surprisingly seductive object. ![]() It’s a sequel of sorts to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), sharing its subtitle ( An American Lyric) and ambidextrous approach: Both books combine poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, words and images. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. ![]()
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