Abstract
In both Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine considers spaces of surveillance in the post-9/11 period. In particular, Rankine explores how the citizenship of black Americans consists of a confused conjunction: on the one hand forms of invisibility, or even social death, and on the other hand, the hypervisibility that results from contemporary regimes of policing and social control. This chapter shows how Rankine’s work frames these moments that insistently turn “recognition” from empathetic identification into surveillant oversight. What could reverse this trajectory? Rankine answers at two levels: first by insisting that hers is an American lyric, and taking recourse to ideas like voting and citizenship, which Rankine positions against the spectatorial attitudes of both the well-intentioned and the media-glutted. This rather conventional approach, which emphasizes civic virtue and the virtue of civics, is further tied to Rankine’s intensive interrogation of pronoun usage in these same works, an exploration I read as an extended comment on the contemporary meanings of the lyric form. I propose that Rankine’s pronoun work can be understood as a reflection on the increasing proximity of surveillance society to the society of the spectacle, which work together in a new “aesthetics of transparency,” one that hobbles classical liberal demands for political representation and personal expression.
The original version of the chapter was revised: Missed out correction in chapter title has been incorporated. The erratum to the chapter is available at 10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_14
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Change history
28 October 2017
The original version of the book was inadvertently published without incorporating the correction in chapter title “Citizen: Claudia Rankine, From the First to the Second Person” which has to be corrected to read as “Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, From the First to the Second Person”. The erratum chapter and the book have been updated with the change.
References
Balibar, É. (2015). Citizenship, T. Scott-Railton, Trans., Cambridge: Polity.
Berlant, L. (2010). Cruel optimism, In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Brighenti, A. M. (2010). Democracy and its visibilities. In K. D. Haggerty & M. Samatas (Eds.), Surveillance and democracy (pp. 51–68). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books.
Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bull, M. (1999). Seeing things hidden: Apocalypse, vision, and totality. London: Verso.
De Man, P. (1984). The rhetoric of romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dandeker, C. (1990). Surveillance, power and modernity: bureaucracy and discipline from 1700 to the present day. Cambridge: Polity.
Frye, N. (1957). [1990], Anatomy of criticism. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Giddens, A. (1985). The nation-state and violence: Volume two of a contemporary critique of historical materialism. Cambridge: Polity.
Hall, R. (2007). Of ziplock bags and black holes: The aesthetics of transparency in the war on terror. The Communication Review, 10, 319–346.
Hall, R. (2015). Terror and the female grotesque: Introducing full-body scanners to U.S. airports. In R. E. Dubrofsky & S. A. Magnet (Eds.), Feminist surveillance studies (pp. 127–149). Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Haggerty, K., & Ericson, R. (2000). The surveillant assemblage. British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 605–622.
Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston: South End Press.
Lyon, D. (2010). Identification, surveillance, and democracy. In K. D. Haggerty & M. Samatas (Eds.), Surveillance and democracy (pp. 34–50). Abingdon & New York: Routledge.
Mann, S., Nolan, J., & Wellman, B. (2003). Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments. Surveillance and Society, 1(3), 331–355.
Mathiesen, T. (1997). The viewer society: Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” revisited. Theoretical Criminology, 1(2), 215–234.
McGrath, J. E. (2004) Loving big brother: performance, privacy, and surveillance space. Routledge, London & New York.
Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Monahan, T. (2006). Counter-surveillance as political intervention? Social Semiotics, 16(4), 515–534.
Mouffe, C. (1992). Democratic politics today. In C. Mouffe (Ed.), Dimensions of radical Democracy: Pluralism, citizenship, community (pp. 1–16). London: Verson.
Nelson, D. (2002). Pursuing privacy in cold war america. New York: Columbia University Press.
Parenti, C. (2003). The soft cage: surveillance in America from slavery to the war on terror. New York: Basic Books.
Pecora, V. P. (2002). The culture of surveillance. Qualitative Sociology, 25(2), 345–358.
Pollard, N. (2012). Speaking to you: Contemporary poetry and public address. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and philosophy, J. Rose, Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rankine, C. (1994). Nothing in nature is private. Cleveland: Cleveland Poetry Center at Cleveland State University.
Rankine, C. (2004). Don’t let me be lonely: An American lyric. St. Paul: Graywolf Press.
Rankine, C. (2014a). Citizen: An American lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.
Rankine, C. (2014b). Blackness as the second person. C. Rankine interviewed by M. Sharma, Guernica (17 November 2014). Retrieved January 20, 2016 from https://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/blackness-as-the-second-person/.
Rankine, C. (2014c). ‘Claudia Rankine’, C. Rankine interviewed by L. Berlant, Bomb (Fall 2014). Retrieved January 20, 2016 from http://bombmagazine.org/article/10096/claudia-rankine.
Rankine, C, & Loffreda, B. (2015). Introduction. In C. Rankine, B. Loffreda, & M. K. Cap (Eds.), The racial imaginary: Writers on race in the life of the mind. Albany: Fence Books.
Schneier, B. (2009). Beyond security theater. New Internationalist. Retrieved January 19, 2016 from https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_security_thea.html.
Smith, J. M. (2007). Apostrophe, or the lyric art of turning away. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 49(4), 411–437.
Tucker, J. A. (2015). Waking up to the sound. American Literary History. Retrieved January 19, 2016 from https://alh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/06/11/alh.ajv033.full.
Wood, D. M. (2007). Beyond the panopticon? Foucault and surveillance studies. In J. Crampton & S. Elden (Eds.), Space, knowledge and power: Foucault and geography (pp. 245–263). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clapp, J. (2017). Surveilling Citizens: Claudia Rankine, From the First to the Second Person. In: Flynn, S., Mackay, A. (eds) Spaces of Surveillance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49084-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49085-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)