30/4/25
Race, Writing and Decolonization Lecture 14: Citizen - Claudia Rankine (2014)
Context
● Born Kingston, Jamaica in 1962.
● USA in late 1960s.
● First book of poetry: Nothing in Nature is Private (1994).
● ‘The lived experience of race and racism in the US’ - Fanon ‘L’expérience vécue du
Noir’. Fanon is alluded to both directly and indirectly.
● Meditation of race and racism in the contemporary period in America. Also,
meditation on the lived experience of race and racism in the United States.
Cover Image:
● Based on In the Hood (1993) - David Hammons’ work of art which references the
Rodney King beatings in 1991.
● Idea of racial profiling - to wear a hood is to be a ‘hood’ (criminal derived from
‘hoodlum’).
● Bodily violence is suggested metonymically.
● Allusion to lynching.
More on context…
● Citizen - published in 2014.
● Trayvon Martin, shot to death in 2012.
● Black Lives Matter from 2013.
● Synchronic - relating to a specific moment in time. Citizen is a text that emerges in
response to the immediate racial violence of the 21st century.
● Diachronic - relating to developments over a long period of time.
Citizen / Citizenship
● Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped
American Citizenship and Labor.
● ‘Citizenship has been used to draw boundaries between those who are included as
members of the community and entitled to respect, protection and right and those
who are excluded and thus not entitled to recognition and rights’.
● Civil Right Act 1866.
● Claudia Rankine, ‘The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning’.
● ‘The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered,
if were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us.
Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of
black bodies as property and subsequently ⅗ human continues to pollute the white
imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but
also grasp it’.
● Conceptual antithesis of ‘citizen / slave’ has not vanished without traces: it’s been
displaced.
Race, Writing and Decolonization Lecture 14: Citizen - Claudia Rankine (2014)
Context
● Born Kingston, Jamaica in 1962.
● USA in late 1960s.
● First book of poetry: Nothing in Nature is Private (1994).
● ‘The lived experience of race and racism in the US’ - Fanon ‘L’expérience vécue du
Noir’. Fanon is alluded to both directly and indirectly.
● Meditation of race and racism in the contemporary period in America. Also,
meditation on the lived experience of race and racism in the United States.
Cover Image:
● Based on In the Hood (1993) - David Hammons’ work of art which references the
Rodney King beatings in 1991.
● Idea of racial profiling - to wear a hood is to be a ‘hood’ (criminal derived from
‘hoodlum’).
● Bodily violence is suggested metonymically.
● Allusion to lynching.
More on context…
● Citizen - published in 2014.
● Trayvon Martin, shot to death in 2012.
● Black Lives Matter from 2013.
● Synchronic - relating to a specific moment in time. Citizen is a text that emerges in
response to the immediate racial violence of the 21st century.
● Diachronic - relating to developments over a long period of time.
Citizen / Citizenship
● Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped
American Citizenship and Labor.
● ‘Citizenship has been used to draw boundaries between those who are included as
members of the community and entitled to respect, protection and right and those
who are excluded and thus not entitled to recognition and rights’.
● Civil Right Act 1866.
● Claudia Rankine, ‘The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning’.
● ‘The truth, as I see it, is that if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered,
if were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us.
Our deaths inside a system of racism existed before we were born. The legacy of
black bodies as property and subsequently ⅗ human continues to pollute the white
imagination. To inhabit our citizenry fully, we have to not only understand this, but
also grasp it’.
● Conceptual antithesis of ‘citizen / slave’ has not vanished without traces: it’s been
displaced.
