To Call You Out, To Call Out You: Claudia Rankine's Decolonial Reading Lesson

• In Event: Black Women’s Poetic and Literary Interventions

Abstract

In her award winning Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine departs from the lyric genre’s conventional first-person “I” mode of address by privileging the standpoint of a second-person “you.” Sometimes this “you” appears in the text to make a direct address to the audience, but more often it moves ambiguously between addressing specific selves with specific memories and a general third-person point of view. Slipping between these modes of address, Citizen’s “you” rarely transforms into the self-possessed “I” characteristic of lyric poetry. Instead, it circles around the construction of the lyric-I, appearing to remain caught within its grammatical summons. This paper argues that Citizen exposes how the subject position symbolized by the conventional lyric-I has been forged as part of a grammar of citizenship with epistemological roots in New World slavery. Indeed, its use of the “you” mode of address offers a decolonial reading lesson that forces readers to confront how the lyric-I has historically appealed to a racialized feeling of (white) citizen subjecthood. Far from bearing significance for the literature classroom alone, Citizen’s reading lesson intervenes in reading practices widely institutionalized within the administration of U.S. higher education. It clarifies in particular how universities have criminalized the speech of faculty and students working to decolonize higher education by racializing their speech as “uncivil,” or as betraying feelings antithetical to academic citizenship.

In his 1833 essay “What is Poetry?,” British imperialist and liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill distinguished poetry from other forms of speech through the poetic speaker’s public performance of ostensibly private feelings associated with civilized culture. The lyric-I of the poem thus symbolized for Mill a modern rational subject distinct from the over-emotionalism he believed to be characteristic of “rude,” “childlike” social orders. Readers’ appropriate emotional response to lyrical poetry likewise marked their belonging within civilized culture and thus their qualification for modern citizenship. Citizen demonstrates how the affective regulation associated with the lyric has reverberated within contemporary official responses to black anger. The text’s exposition of sanctions against tennis player Serena Williams, for instance, demonstrates how black anger has been criminalized as an uncivil response to institutionalized racial injustice. I use Citizen’s grammatical intervention in the lyric’s conventional first-person mode of address as a means to analyze how universities have racialized the speech of student activists working in alignment with Black Lives Matter as uncivil. In public cases made against activists, student demands of universities are often read as betraying an angry and immature over-emotionalism with the potential to threaten institutional commitments to liberal values of “diversity,” “tolerance,” and “pluralism.” I suggest that in “call[ing] out you” Citizen issues a provocation to reimagine activist student anger as a type of rationality with the potential to transform the university.

Author

• Elizabeth C Brown, University of Washington Seattle