Against the White Racial Imaginary: Claudia Rankine, <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) makes legible what neoliberalism has obscured – the ongoing, even the intensification of, white supremacy’s organization of social space. This essay shows how Rankine illuminates an American landscape forged in history, steeped in memory and invested with symbolic meaning to argue that it is, fundamentally, constructed by and entangled with white supremacy. Rankine reworks pastoral lyric imagery and documentary photography to situate contemporary anti-black violence within a longer history of white terror. She defamiliarizes the language of reportage to critique documentary strategies of visual evidence that reinscribe racial hierarchies through reliance upon an unmarked white gaze. In place of individual testimony, documentary evidence and bounded lyric subjectivity, Rankine gathers an assembly of voices, employing rhetorical strategies that resist the violence of neoliberal individuation.