Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Infographic Maps, and Subject-System Identity in Contemporary Political thought

Abstract

Claudia Rankine's 2004 poem Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric is often hailed as experimental, combining documentary photographs, custom-made graphics, and written-word poetry. I argue that we can best understand the book's lyric project by anchoring it in one of the book's images, and reading both in conjunction with a genre with a related social project, the contemporary infographic map of the United States. These all display something crucial about twenty-first century political thought: a tendency to conflate, confuse, and equate the individual political subject with the wider system to which s/he/they are joined. Not only does articulating this mode of thought contextualize lyric subject experimentation as part of a wider socio-cultural trend, it also displays an impasse in contemporary political struggle.