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Citizen
260 pages
A genre-bending, visceral catalog of the everyday aggressions that chip away at the soul.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like holding your breath. It is a steady, accumulative experience that builds tension through the relentless cataloging of everyday racial aggressions. By employing a striking second-person perspective, the narrative forces you into an intimate, often claustrophobic space where the boundaries between poetry, essay, and visual art dissolve. The prose is sharp, lyrical, and unflinching, capturing the profound exhaustion of navigating a society where belonging is always conditional. It is not a fast read, but rather a heavy, deliberate one that demands pauses for reflection. This is a vital, transformative text for readers who appreciate intellectually rigorous, emotionally resonant cultural criticism that exposes the invisible, physical toll of systemic marginalization.
- Mood
- tense
- claustrophobic
- reflective
- heavy
- Tone
- unflinching
- urgent
- incisive
- weary
- intimate
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the exhaustion of everyday racism · microaggressions and invisibility · the physical toll of marginalization · conditional citizenship · the burden of hyper-visibility
- The writing
- A genre-defying blend of lyric poetry, prose essay, and visual art that frequently employs a disarming second-person perspective.
- The arc
- Moves from the jarring shock of everyday slights to a profound, collective exhaustion, culminating in a stark meditation on survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers seeking a visceral, intellectually rigorous exploration of race in America that bridges the gap between poetry and cultural criticism.
Content notes
- racism and racial slurs
- police brutality
- microaggressions
- systemic trauma
About the book
You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition. --from back cover
"Claudia Rankine's 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 TV -- everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's 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." -- from publisher's description.
Description from Open Library.
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