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A Poetics of American Citizenship: Blackness, Injury, and Claudia Rankines Citizen

Law, Culture and the Humanities

Published online on

Abstract

Theories of citizenship have relied both explicitly and implicitly on the concept of "standing." This article challenges "standing" as a metaphor of citizenship by contrasting it with that of "injury." Examining Claudia Rankine’s Citizen elucidates a poetics of citizenship that both calls attention to what prevents many black citizens in the United States from standing and provides a basis for alternative practices of citizenship. Refusing a politics of ressentiment often tied to identification of social injury, Citizen prefigures a transformed citizenship of tarrying, listening, and transformative interruption of the racialized status quo.