Abstract

In this article I analyze Citizen. An American Lyric (2014) by Jamaican-American writer Claudia Rankine. Citizen offers a multimodal and polyphonic approach to racism in the United States, addressing its impact on the lives of black individuals and communities. Black people are subjected to daily, repetitive and insidious experiences of racial micro-aggression, while living in fear of police violence. Citizen juxtaposes scenes of racist micro-aggressions with others in which racist violence is overt, providing an account of the complex mechanism that produces and reproduces racism in the United States. My reading of Citizen also proposes that the axis of invisibility and hypervisibility in the book allows us to account for central aspects of the experiences of discrimination suffered by the African-American population.