Intimacy at the Point of Rupture: Mourning, Memory and Mediation in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

This thesis examines what Rankine calls “public mourning” as a fundamental kind of narrative structure for her 2014 work Citizen: An American Lyric. I begin with Bakhtin’s notion of a chronotope to describe how mourning as a narrative structure embeds a reader into the narrator’s communicated knowledge, experience, etc. as a kind of landscape. As such, the act of reading—or becoming involved in the narrator’s mourning—is experiential rather than merely communicative. In the body of the thesis, I focus on narrative intimacy and the particular challenges that anti-Black racism poses for Rankine’s narrator to narrating her experiences. On Rankine’s account, anti-Black racism permeates language, gains expression in spectacular images of violence and daily micro-aggressions—the two combined create a category of repeated injury and exclusion for Black people in America. I draw upon Saidiya Hartman’s and Christina Sharpe’s work to argue that Orlando Patterson’s historical notion of social death is central to Rankine’s narrative project of expressing Black Americans’ experiences as an American lyric. Hartman and Sharpe provide readings of social death, not as mired in the particular historicity of American slavery, but in the afterlife of that slavery, or in its wake, where Rankine’s narrator lives out her everyday—in this way, social death is a fundamental structure of Black American social life. In the body of the thesis, I explore what social death means for Rankine’s narrative structure.
I examine Rankine’s use of the second-person and draw upon Roland Barthes’ work on the middle voice in order to argue that Rankine presents a narrator who is simultaneous to the act of narration, caught between external address and internal reflection. It is this suspension, between internal and external, passive and active, that I call being at the point of rupture, where the narrator is both caught in the act of externalization, yet remains nevertheless at the site of internal reflection. For Rankine’s narrator, social death structures her access to language and broader social life through these moments of inconclusive rupture—of intimate social settings being thrown open, exposed disproportionately to injury through expressions of anti-Black racism. Intimacy becomes, then, a double-bind at a narrative level: the narrator’s desire for intimacy is conditioned by its repeated interruption, yet in holding witness to intimacy’s failure, Rankine turns toward an external reader in an act of intimate narrative address. I argue that Rankine models this narrative intimacy through her reading of Serena Williams in Sections II and IV as a kind of literary encounter, which actively co-involves the reader in the act of narrative production. As such, Rankine reformulates a social life threatened by repeated exposure to social death into a literary encounter that mutually suspends narrator and reader in dynamic relation to one another.
In the conclusion, I return to the question of narrative intimacy and argue for a slightly different narrative model, not merely of repeatedly iterated intimacy, but of a conclusive rupture out of narration—not of reformulating social life in the zone of literary encounter, but of rupturing completely out of relation, into an undisclosed, yet unrealized dynamic. In this final section, I pay particular attention to the images in Citizen as zones of narrative (dis)appearance, where the narrator is both present, yet she escapes linguistic determination. In particular, these moments of (dis)appearance are informed by the pictures in Citizen that emphasize the ambiguity of experience and the incoherence of historical narration. Though Rankine’s Citizen presents a model of narrative intimacy sustained through language, it ultimately provides the narrator the space to escape determination, in whatever form she presents (or disappears) to be differently possible.