“You are in the Dark”: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Black Transnational Identities

Black experimentalism probes different historical experiences and exclusive literary legacies that document a past marred by racism, injustice, humiliation, and exclusion. In the twenty-first century, black experimentalists face new challenges as they confront new means of racist aggression, unfair discrimination, and social rejection. This paper examines Jamaican American poet Claudia Rankine’s cross-genre Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which exposes micro- and macro-aggressions and reveals quotidian racism against blacks in America. The paper attempts to answer the questions: How does Rankine, through a transnational self-positioning, establish the ostentatiously lyrical ‘I’ of the narrative voice and address an ambiguous ‘you’? And how are black identities forged amid those ever-racist micro- and macro-aggressions in the contemporary world? How does a transnation force its citizens to forge transnational identities therefore “marking a people in a state of perpetual not-at-homeness?” as Ashcroft puts it (2010, 74).