This essay contends that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) invites an overdue conversation between recent scholarship in lyric theory and writing on racial surveillance, including material on bias in artificial intelligence and disciplinary policing strategies. I argue that Citizen manipulates received structures of the lyric as both a racial and a carceral apparatus and compares those structures to contemporary forms of racial surveillance. Through the revelation of similarity in lyric and surveillance structures, Citizen illustrates a method of reading that exploits lyric history and form to suggest a reorientation of surveillance and a way of coping with its effects. I argue that this new American lyric is invested in participating in public life.
The essay explores whether concealing humanness or emphasizing humanness is a more effective strategy for anti-drone activism that seeks to disrupt the conventional epistemologies of militarized surveillance. Building on Édouard Glissant’s decolonizing philosophy of relation and more recent theories of gender and surveillance such as Rachel Hall’s notion of “animal opacity,” the essay argues that poetry is one place we might find an answer to what seems like a binary problem of seeing versus unseeing humanity in technologically mediated aerial warfare. I illustrate that the 2016 poetry collection LOOK by Solmaz Sharif intervenes to suggest activism that steers readers away from the logics of recognition and toward the ethical potential of concealment. LOOK garners formal elements from lyric and experimental poetry traditions to employ a strategy of resistance-looking based in multiple valences of opacity.multiple valences of opacity.
This essay seeks to define a twenty-first-century ethical reading practice. The term “ethical reading practice” suggests a way of reading and responding to literature responsibly and carefully, ultimately producing a generative encounter with the text, which has implications far outside the text. To consider what literature can teach us about ethics, and how it teaches us, this essay focuses on the figure of the reader. By examining the ways readers are figured within poetry, we can gain insight into reading and ethics on multiple scales. Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” is an example of her larger body of work, which often stages conversations between a lyric I—a speaker who is not only the speaking subject in the poem but also a reader of other poems—and a body of past literature. Carson’s poetry tells us that our affective relationships to texts have consequences outside the texts; her work suggests that loving texts, and knowing how to read them, honoring that love, is an ethical encounter. “The Glass Essay” coins the word “whaching,” a contingent practice—sometimes meaning one open question, sometimes another. Similar to Jacques Derrida’s notion of téléiopoièse, and Gayatri Spivak’s “teleopoiesis,” this passive ethics of reading emphasizes being made rather than making. The article discusses the process of reading this new singular orthography, while also revealing how an ethical reading practice has consequences for the way we encounter borders, read transnational literatures, and formulate ourselves.
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