Claudia Rankine is Coming to Hofstra!
I could not be more excited.
Do you know about Claudia Rankine?
For the next month, I am on a mission to make sure that you not only know about Rankine, but that you’ve read her stunning book, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), a media-rich and poetic meditation on being-while-black in America.
It’s a slim volume, with stark white pages and grey text interspersed with images from artists and sports journalism; the subjects of its meditations — colleagues and strangers, “incidents” featuring black athletes, subway rides, Hurricane Katrina, Trayvon Martin, school memories — are accessible and the tone is as contemplative as it is affecting.
It’s not a book you read to feel good; it’s a book you read to feel — and to know what it feels like to be forced, as Rankine’s speaker is, “to take in things you don’t want” in everyday, ordinary moments. For readers who already know what that feels like, the book offers support in quiet, beautiful, and sometimes fierce expressions of personhood. For these readers, Rankine offers a salvo to think about what would happen if you let your feelings take shape as words, inviting you to imagine what will happen if you “just cry out” your anger, frustration, and demoralization. “To know what you’ll sound like,” her speaker says, “is worth noting.”
For those who don’t know or don’t want to know how that constraint feels, or hear what responses might look like, the book is a simultaneously gentle and challenging way to confront the impact of our own unconscious, unquestioning modes of citizenship. It offers a vicarious glimpse into a lived reality that is common in America yet also denied, simplified, and caricatured in everything from intimate conversations to public discourse and popular media.
In Citizen, Rankine gives all of us a profound way to think about what it means to be a body, to be a friend, to exist as a thinking person, and therein, to understand what it requires to be truly conscious of American social dynamics. In reading her “American Lyric,” we are privy to a compilation of moments, both small and significant, some subtle and some obvious, that underpin our status as citizens and we can see the nuanced ways these interactions shape our relationships with others.
Rankine’s visit is organized in conjunction between the Hofstra English Department and the Cultural Center as part of the Great Writers, Great Readings series. Hofstra University Honors College is proud to support Rankine’s book and Hofstra courses that are focused on it; we’ll be running a contest for work inspired by Citizen in conjunction with the Hofstra English Department. But first, you’ll have to read it.
Are you ready? Here are a few ways to get your hands on a copy:
1) This weekend, hit up the reserve desk in Axinn library and ask for the book held under course number HUHC 20: Citizen by Claudia Rankine (Free w/Hof ID for 2 hours)
2) Starting 9/25, M-F: visit the Honors College office and ask to check out a copy of Citizen (Free w/HofID for 24 hours)
3) After 10/1, M-F: visit the English department office (Mason 204) and ask for a copy (pay a deposit and keep the book; deposit returned at Rankine’s visit, so the book is free) or see Drs. Henton (Mason 307) or Pasupathi (Axinn 243)
4) purchase a copy online
For more information and additional posts from me about Rankine’s book, visit the posts here, here, and here!
