Claudia Rankine (/ˈræŋkɪn/; born September 4, 1963[1]) is an American poet, essayist, playwright and the editor of several anthologies. She is the author of five volumes of poetry, two plays and various essays.
Claudia Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and later immigrated to the United States during childhood. After growing up in New York City, she was educated at Williams College and Columbia University.
Her work has appeared in many journals, including Harper's, GRANTA, the Kenyon Review, and the Lana Turner Journal, and she is a contributor to New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.[9] Rankine co-edits (with Juliana Spahr) the anthology series American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language.
Winner of an Academy of American Poets fellowship, Rankine's work Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), an experimental project, has been acclaimed for its unique blend of poetry, essay, lyric and television imagery. Of this volume, poet Robert Creeley wrote: "Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I've yet seen. It's master work in every sense, and altogether her own."[10]
Rankine's play The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by The Foundry Theatre,[11][12] was a 2011 Distinguished Development Project Selection in the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage.[13]
In 2014, Graywolf Press published her book of poetry Citizen: An American Lyric.[14] Kamran Javadizadeh dissects this novel, particularly Rankine's allusion to Robert Lowell'sLife Studies. He writes that Citizen takes a new angle on and recognizes Lowell's whiteness,[15] a subject of interest for Rankine.
"Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks you begin to understand yourself as rendered hyper-visible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back as insane as it is, saying please."
Rankine also works on documentary multimedia pieces with her husband, photographer and filmmaker John Lucas. These video essays are titled Situations.
Of her work, poet Mark Doty wrote: "Claudia Rankine's formally inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it's like to be a subject and the ways we're defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions."[17]
In a 2023 review in The Guardian of her 2001 collection Plot, critic Kate Kellaway wrote: "It is a bracing, discomfiting and complicated read partly because it breaks a taboo. It is often oppressively assumed that women will necessarily rejoice at pregnancy but this work involves a complicated dredging of doubt, an examination of the visceral and cerebral burden of pregnancy, a deliberate losing of the 'plot' (the word encompassing several meanings)."[18]
Rankine additionally founded and curates the Racial Imaginary Institute, which she called "a moving collaboration with other collectives, spaces, artists, and organizations towards art exhibitions, readings, dialogues, lectures, performances, and screenings that engage the subject of race."[19]
In 2017, Rankine collaborated with choreographer and performer Will Rawls to generate the work What Remains. Collaborators included Tara Aisha Willis, Jessica Pretty, Leslie Cuyjet, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.[20] The work premiered at Bard College, and has been performed at national venues, including Danspace in New York, the Walker Art Center, Yale Repertory Theatre, and Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art Warehouse Space. In an interview with Rawls, Rankine described how text and language were manipulated in the performance: "As a writer, you spend a lot of time trying to get all of these words to communicate a feeling or to communicate an action, and to be able to get rid of the words but still hold the feeling was stunning to me."[21]
The Racial Imaginary Institute
The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII) is an interdisciplinary collective established in 2017 by Rankine using funds from her 2016 MacArthur Grant.[22][23] TRII is a think tank for artists and writers who study whiteness and examine race as a construct.[24][25] Its mission is to convene "a cultural laboratory in which the racial imaginaries of our time and place are engaged, read, countered, contextualized and demystified."[26]
Rankine envisions the organization as occupying a physical space in Manhattan;[27] until that is possible, the institute is roving.[24] In 2017, the Whitney Museum presented "Perspectives on Race and Representation: An Evening With the Racial Imaginary Institute" to address the debate sparked by Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket.[25][28] In the summer of 2018, TRII presented "On Whiteness," an exhibition, symposium, library, residencies, and performances, at The Kitchen in New York.[29][30][31]
^ abRankine, Claudia (February 12, 2001). "Claudia Rankine". Claudia Rankine. Archived from the original on September 26, 2017. Retrieved November 19, 2018.
^Landesberg, Paige (September 26, 2018). "To Watch and Be Watched". THE SEEN | Chicago's International Online Journal. Archived from the original on February 15, 2021. Retrieved March 9, 2019.
