On racism and the impossibility of mourning: A critical reading of Claudia Rankine's citizen, an American lyric

Abstract

Claudia Rankine's Citizen, An American Lyric (2015) problematizes the notion of citizenship through theory-laden poetical prose, images, and video scripts. This paper aims to critically read Citizen, the theoretical work In the Wake: on Blackness and Being (2016) written by Christina Sharpe, and Sara Ahmed's Phenomenology of Whiteness (2007) and Living a Feminist Life (2017). The trace of canonical thinkers for Critical Race Theory (CRT) such as Frantz Fanon or Achille Mbembe will also be observed. I contend that Citizen can be read in the vein of a theoretical work close to CRT approaches, as it tackles similar topics such as death, structural racism, necropolitics, and raced intimacy. It provides multiple illustrative cases which are poetry-laden and politically-laden, as well as theoretical statements that give accounts of the phenomenology of racism in current US.