Citizan, An American Lyric

A provocative meditation on race Claudia Rankines long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Dont Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric Claudia Rankines 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 TVeverywhere all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a persons 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.