Today, as race, gender or religion are not supposed to justify inequality anymore, the question of what constitutes citizenship and whether equality amongst citizens has been realised is as current as ever. The fact that Claudia Rankine’s "Citizen: An American Lyric", that deals with the notion of citizenship and racial discrimination, has been the most widely discussed and celebrated work of poetry in 2014 illustrates that Rankine has touched on a sensitive issue.
Claudia Rankine as black, female writer explores in Citizen the various aspects of private and political citizenship and uses diverse genres to illustrate the multifaced problems. It will be analysed how the term citizenship is traditionally defined and how Claudia Rankine breaks with this expectations in subverting the subject of social standing into that of injury, effectively questioning the possibility for minorities to reach acknowledgement and equal treatment in society.
Citizen illustrates the discrimination of minority citizens by depicting microaggressions and subconscious racial bias in everyday life and shows that acknowledging the problem is not enough. It presents media as an alternate way for representation and uses multiple genres to reflect upon language and to promote alternative ways of communication.
- Quote paper
- Anonymous (Author), 2017, This is How You Are a Citizen? The Interpretation of Citizenship and Genre in Claudia Rankine’s "Citizen: An American Lyric", Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.hausarbeiten.de/document/1718688
