ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the ways in which Claudia Rankine’s Citizen manipulates poetic voice and address through a matrix of images and visual aesthetics to stress the technologies of racial and cultural memory. Situating her text within a history of African American literature, specifically works by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Toni Morrison, it establishes the interrelation between voice and image in Rankine’s work as part of a larger statement about the history of documenting within African American writing. It then goes on to show how Rankine’s paradoxical speaker/reader expresses the terms of American citizenship, from the veil of W.E.B DuBois to the hood of the Black Lives Matter movement, through a bricolage of discourse and image (e.g., photos of Serena Williams, Zinedine Zidane, and the Jena Six). Because those images exist in online and offline forms, they immerse readers in the racism and sexism that inscribe Rankine’s speaker in multiple spaces and on multiple platforms. Recombining media images and visual aesthetics along with an immersive second-person address in this manner, Rankine’s work deconstructs archetypal media images while transforming them for her own purposes.
