This segment returns in time, before anybody realized this would be a noteworthy occasion. “Would not have made it through AP Literature without the printable PDFs. In the following poem about the Jena Six, Rankine illustrates the deeply racist and threatening provocation of nooses appearing in a tree on a high-school campus. Rankine experiments with boundaries. These snippets were recorded and used during the trial of the man who killed Martin. Don't Let Me Be Lonely, part one (10:27): MP3 In the midst of emergency, nobody is to be found and it is hard to separate this occasion from the many that divide the haves and have-nots. As New Yorker writer Don Chiasson notes, Rankine has said that this is an attempt to "pull the lyric back into its realities." Calling upon this painful dynamic, Materazzi reduces Zidane to his ethnicity, flinging racist and bigoted words at him. Again, readers encounter another abstract and poetic section. Citizen An American Lyric (Book) : Rankine, Claudia : "Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. discuss with reference to Claudia Rankine's Citizen. This is also the section most heavily criticized because of its attempts to tie politics, a highly fact-driven field, into poetry, a highly emotion-driven field. This, in turn, causes the protagonist to question why someone would ever feel disconnected from this kind of tragedy, since any human should be able to understand this sorrow and anger. Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. This interaction might seem surprising in the context of the 2006 World Cup, but it’s unfortunately not all that astonishing, since anti-Muslim sentiments are still quite prominent in contemporary times and were perhaps especially pronounced in the 2000s, when there was so much international concentration on terrorism, which many people unfairly associated with all Muslims. Citizen An American Lyric (Book) : Rankine, Claudia : "Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. In a script for a “situation video” about the 2006 soccer World Cup, a number of quotes appear by writers and thinkers like. "October 10, 2006 / World Cup," the seventh poem, follows an escalation of events involving two players at a soccer match, one of which (Zinedine Zidane) is of Algerian ethnicity. Word Count: 198. The Question and Answer section for Citizen: An American Lyric is a great The first poem contrasts the "fiction of facts" which "assumes randomness and indeterminacy" with the necessity of visual presence (73-75). This Wednesday, April 25, I will be co-facilitating a campus-wide discussion with Dr. Ching-In Chen (SHSU Department of English) on Claudia Rankine’s (2014) book-length poem Citizen: An American Lyric. At... Look at the first paragraph on page 24. Get started. Chapters 5-6. I also found section VI on Katrina, Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, the Jena Six, and New York’s stop and frisk policy especially powerful. Citizen: An American Lyric essays are academic essays for citation. A black and blue 3-photo album appears next. A woman down the train asks a man to switch seats so she can sit with her daughter or son. When the media frames the rioting and looting that takes place after Mark Duggan’s murder as “opportunism,” it becomes clear that the situation’s narrative has been distorted. The unidentified speaker then suggests that “boys will be boys,” especially as they try to figure out “the position of positioning,” which everyone knows is only a problem for “one kind of boy.”. It's not a hoodlum driving the truck, either: it is "just teens," no gang, "just a teen," "with straggly blond hair," "a slight blond man" (84). The next photos show a pattern of close-up shots of white men and bars on windows and generally being enclosed. I also found section VI on Katrina, Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, the Jena Six, and New York’s stop and frisk policy especially powerful. While trying to get away for a moment, the creaking stairs fill the sonic landscape; it is never silent. Copyright © 1999 - 2021 GradeSaver LLC. In fact, roughly half of this section is comprised of quotes from both African-American and white historical figures. If you are asked to move, you will tell them that you are "traveling as a family" (114). This may be to remind the reader that 'you' are always part of the story and the associated injustices. The College of Education and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sam Houston State University, with our partners from the Division of Student Affairs,… And though this doesn’t necessarily excuse the Jena Six for resorting to violence, readers will perhaps sense that they are in the process of learning that outrage (and, indeed, violence) isn’t a productive way of responding to bigotry and injustice. As soon as a different passenger gets off, the woman sits down. This aligns with the notion that anger sometimes only invites more racism and mistreatment. Recorded live at WKCR-FM (New York) by Tom Kelly on May 17, 2002. Symbols & Motifs. Chapters 1-2. My students love how organized the handouts are and enjoy tracking the themes as a class.”. It moves out from the abstract world of the last two sections and into the nitty-gritty details of historical events. Read the Study Guide for Citizen: An American Lyric…, Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Poetry, Politcs, and Personal Reflection: Redefining the Lyric in Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation, Citizen: A Discourse on our Post-Racial Society, View our essays for Citizen: An American Lyric…, Introduction to Citizen: An American Lyric, View the lesson plan for Citizen: An American Lyric…, View Wikipedia Entries for Citizen: An American Lyric…. Each was described as a script of a situation video. It’s unclear who is speaking during this section, though it seems possible that the voice belongs to Trayvon Martin, a black teenager from Florida who was shot and killed by a member of a gated community’s neighborhood watch in 2012. In the original picture, two black men hang from the tree. Stop-and-frisk is a notoriously racist policy, one that has led to stereotyping and many unfair interactions between police officers and people of color. Yet, the narrator is well aware of the fact that "you can't drive yourself sane" (94, 96, 98). content is what is said in a literary work, form is the way in which it is said. In her critique of racism and visibility, Rankine details the quotidian microaggressions African-Americans face, discusses controversial incidents such as backlashes against tennis player Serena Williams, and inquires about the ramifications of the shootings of Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, the Jena Six, and Hurricane Katrina are all treated powerfully in Citizen, but Rankine’s foregrounding of the more persistent noise of everyday racism is itself a protest against the demand placed on black artists to perform familiar forms of “commodified anger.” Teachers and parents! The narrator focuses on words as the worst form of segregation, calling them "simple, naked, and unanswerable hatred" (109). It isn’t particularly clear what, exactly, a “situation video” is, though readers will perhaps have a better sense if they visit Claudia Rankine’s website, where there are a number of conceptual videos accompanied by the text in this section. ... 2006 / Jena Six,” brings a boy into contact with many natural things, such as trees and grass, that now have connotations that he cannot escape. Somewhere on his face is "an answer to question" (105), which refers to an early quotation from Dostoevsky. An abstract painting, showing a black male made of bright gold and blue riveted metals, finishes this poem. 15 The video poem opens to the sounds of organ music, reminiscent of a Baroque funeral dirge, followed by a group of black teens walking towards a clothing boutique. Download Save. This is the blue sky. He can just feel that this is going to happen. Instant downloads of all 1408 LitChart PDFs Communicating nonverbally, he and the protagonist then feel supported by one another despite the unaccommodating atmosphere of their immediate environment, which is full of people who are clearly biased against black people. Struggling with distance learning? On January 6th, 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. 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