ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The New Yorker,
Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times,
Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29,
and many more . . .
A provocative
meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her
groundbreaking book Don't Let Me
Be Lonely: An American Lyric.
Claudia Rankine's
bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing
encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some
of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and
some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket,
at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer
field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time.
The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to
speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the
state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and
expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen
is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of
racism in our contemporary, often named post-race society.
