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영어

Jamaican American poet Claudia Rankine’s unique book, Citizen: An American Lyric, depicts various portraits of racism and microaggression in an exclusive white community in the United States. Rankine has suggested that the examples of microaggression in her book effectively showed the way racism harms people in real life. Citizen also subverted the conventions of traditional lyric poetry dominated by white males, through intertwining her poems with various visual art forms as supplement texts. This paper argues that the repeated microaggressions in Citizen inscribed anger, injustice and resignation both on the speaker’s body and the reader’s body. Finally, this paper discusses how the cumulative effect of the black experiences was ingrained into communal memory. Through this, Rankine reframed microaggressions in daily lives into discourses on racial imagery against a social and historical background.