The Pragmatics of Racism in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. An American Lyric (2014)

This article analyses how Claudia Rankine's acclaimed book-length poem Citizen. An American Lyric, published in 2014, has readers experience racism in the very process of reading. It argues that the book theorises what I call a "pragmatics of racism", in its enactment of the implicit working of racism in interactions, revealing the place assigned to each speaker on the grounds of their skin colour. It goes on to show the way the ordinary microaggressions of black people have affective effects on their bodies. Finally it examines the choice of the second-person pronoun in Citizen, claiming that the fluctuating function and pragmatic force of you, hovering between reference and address, aptly mirrors the different positioning that subjects ascribe to others or have ascribed to them by others.