Figures of Citizen: Claudia Rankine’s Lyricism and Rhetoric

Abstract

In Claudia Rankine’s award-winning collage poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), I argue, the ongoing, inconclusive labor of registering and resisting racial and patriarchal hierarchies entails a complex formalism. The text, that is, asserts the persistence of what Caroline Levine calls “constraining forms” and makes insistent, lyrical appeals for the shaping of new, less harmful ones. To fully appreciate the political and ethical force of this modern-day, African-American lyric, I also contend, it is necessary to attend to the specifically literary dimensions of Rankine’s formalism, the manner in which her figures, tropes, and other rhetorical devices simultaneously politicize and personalize poetics. Employing such techniques as a second-person poetic voice, intertextual engagement with the lyric tradition, shifting linguistic registers, and metafigurality, Citizen discloses the material, somatic imprints of microaggression and a history of racial oppression on the black “citizen.” This formalism, then, imaginatively exploits the forms that inevitably shape reality, and produce racist and sexist stereotypes, to generate affect and provoke reflection, a persuasive strategy for inducing readers, especially white ones, to relinquish pernicious myths of American innocence and literary dreams of transcendence.