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Claudia rankine books5/26/2023 ![]() ![]() 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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