Claudia Rankine’s new book, which was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry, recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly 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 TV.
Rankine, a former UGA faculty member, reveals the accumulative stresses that come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform and stay alive.
In essay, image and poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric is a testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in contemporary, often named “post-race,” society.
