- Title
- “Womxn like me are made”: politics and poetics in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
- Creator
- Wilken, Chelsey
- ThesisAdvisor
- Phiri, Aretha
- ThesisAdvisor
- Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Subject
- Rankine, Claudia, 1963- Citizen
- Subject
- Putuma, Koleka -- Collective amnesia
- Subject
- Black people -- Race identity
- Subject
- Black people in literature
- Date
- 2020
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Masters
- Type
- MA
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/145735
- Identifier
- vital:38462
- Description
- This thesis utilises an interdisciplinary approach to understand the political significance of the experimental poetics used by Claudia Rankine in Citizen: An American Lyric and Koleka Putuma in Collective Amnesia. Rankine and Putuma offer contemporary reflections on what it means to occupy marginalised spaces in society. These artists experiment with formal and conventional aspects of literature to explore and create new definitions of what it means to be Black in society. Their works and techniques allow for thinking outside of dominant ideologies of race and posit alternative Black identities that are not found within canonical theory on Blackness. This project reflects on existing theories of Black subjectivity as evident in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Aimé Césaire’s Notebook on the Return to My Native Land. While these theorists did not reject the role of Black women in Western civilisation, they should be read as a moment in a series of counter-discourse to the Black Other rather than the finite canon of Black subjectivity. The emergence of Rankine and Putuma’s experimental poetics works to disrupt the conflation of the Black subject with the Black heteronormative male. Using Michelle M. Wright’s Physics of Blackness as its primary theoretical framework, this project advocates alternative and disruptive readings of Blackness that potentially shift Blackness away from its conflation with nationalism, masculinity and heteronormativity. This thesis uses a dialogical approach between political theory and literature which allows for Citizen and Collective Amnesia to be read as acts of resistance to epistemological erasure and as articulations of the politics relevant to the poets’ lived experiences. Both the United States and South Africa have a history of institutionalised racial segregation, which allows Rankine and Putuma to be read in relation to one another. Where the Civil Rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle were both foregrounded as male-lead liberation movements contemporary social movements including #blacklivesmatter and #feesmustfall have initiated a return to the androcentric philosophies of Malcom X and Steve Biko, for example. As such Rankine and Putuma’s literature and art marks a reclamation of female empowerment and visibility in the face of a political rhetoric that continues to be masculine and nationalist in nature. In the absence of a space where Black female and queer bodies are adequately recognised, the poetry they write creates a space of self-representation and recognition.
- Format
- 108 pages, pdf
- Publisher
- Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, English
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Wilken, Chelsey
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Collections
Gender Action Forum (GENACT)
RU Department of Literary Studies in English
SDG 05. Gender Equality
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details | SOURCE1 | WILKEN-MA-TR20-251.pdf | 758 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details |