Discussion of Claudia Rankine's book Citizen: An American Lyric

Sun, Oct 25th and Nov 1st from 1 - 3pm
Registration required. Register here.

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming 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.

Facilitator: Janet Winston, Professor of English and Critical Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies at HSU, will facilitate a discussion with readers of this book of prose poetry about America's racial violence against its Black citizens, including seemingly isolated racial microaggressions, and about American's history of whiteness and white supremacy.