ABSTRACT
This essay responds to recent calls for a “critical race narratology.” It suggests that a notion of “narrative disidentification” can offer an alternative heuristic through which to view the formal strategies of minoritized writers. José Muñoz defines disidentification as narrative subject formation that exposes and recircuits the encoded messages of the dominant culture in order to “account for, include, and empower minority identities” (6). Expanding this usage to account more explicitly for narrative form, the essay asserts that writers of color often forge disidentificatory subjectivities that represent forms of resistance to dominant narrative structures.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: A Lyric exemplifies this disidentifying positioning. Possessing a dynamic and emergent narrativity, Rankine’s text suggests alternative ways of understanding narrative as nodal, associational and dialogic. Citizen offers intersectional understandings of gendered, raced and classed subjectivity—an alternative to the citizenship from which the speaker and the second-person addressee of the text are excluded. This open-ended alternative is not, however, a comfortable one. Like a disordered, unstable or chaotic narrative, Rankine’s understanding of identity in a post-Ferguson U.S. is meant to unsettle, to leave us disheveled, de-territorialized and rankled.
