American Lyric, American Surveillance, and Claudia Rankine’sCitizen

Abstract

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.