“You are in the Dark”: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Black Transnational Identities

Yomna Saber

doi:10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.3

Authors

Yomna Saber Qatar University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7211-2613

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.2.3

Keywords:

Claudia Rankine, Citizen, experimentalism, apostrophe, racism, transnational

Abstract

Black experimentalism probes different historical experiences and exclusive literary legacies that document a past marred by racism, injustice, humiliation, and exclusion. In the twenty-first century, black experimentalists face new challenges as they confront new means of racist aggression, unfair discrimination, and social rejection. This paper examines Jamaican American poet Claudia Rankine’s cross-genre Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), which exposes micro- and macro-aggressions and reveals quotidian racism against blacks in America. The paper attempts to answer the questions: How does Rankine, through a transnational self-positioning, establish the ostentatiously lyrical ‘I’ of the narrative voice and address an ambiguous ‘you’? And how are black identities forged amid those ever-racist micro- and macro-aggressions in the contemporary world? How does a transnation force its citizens to forge transnational identities therefore “marking a people in a state of perpetual not-at-homeness?” as Ashcroft puts it (2010, 74).

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Author Biography

Yomna Saber, Qatar University

Yomna Saber is Professor of English Literature at Qatar University. Her recent publications include essays published in Neohelicon, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies, Voices of Illness: Negotiating Meaning and Identity (Brill 2019), Folklore, and the monograph Gendered Masks of Liminality and Race: Black Female Trickster’s Subversion of Hegemonic Discourse in African American Literature (Peter Lang 2017).

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