Black Poetics of Affect: Intimate Public Encounters with Strangers in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020)

Abstract

This article aims to explore how Jamaican-born writer Claudia Rankine displays the ways in which, as a black woman and a first-generation migrant settled in the United States, she ‘regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse’ (Rankine [2020] Just Us: An American Conversation, New York: Penguin, p. 23). Just Us: An American Conversation is a genre-defying work that includes poems, essays, photography, visual art, posts from social media, and academic and journalistic sources that tackle the discursive constructions of whiteness in cultural and political life in the United States. In this volume, the private and the public merge through conversations with white strangers and friends at the airport and the train station, in the classroom, in the backyard, in the street and in social distancing interactions via Zoom. Berlant ([2011] Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke UP.) writes about public spheres as ‘affect worlds’, where emotions precede rational or deliberative thought, attaching strangers to each other and defining the terms of the state-civil society relation. I also use Sara Ahmed’s idea of ‘encounter’ (2000, 2012), defined as a meeting with others that surprises and involves conflict, because it shifts the boundaries of the familiar or assumed knowledge. In this sense, Rankine creatively looks for traces of racialized and gendered experiences in encounters that involve bodies or texts, including the devastating effects of Covid-19 on marginalized black communities. The volume completes a vital trilogy that includes the hybrid book-length poems Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Citizen (2014). This lyrical series conform what I call ‘a black poetics of affect’, shaped by intimate public encounters with racism and sexism that disrupt the fantasy of a post-racial society. Rankine’s sustained reflections on ‘the affective dimensions of Black life’ (Palmer [2017] ‘“What Feels More Than Feeling?”: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect’, Critical Ethnic Studies 3:2, pp. 31–56.) provide new and situated insights on affect theories and feminist studies.

Keywords:

• Claudia Rankine
• affect
• stranger
• racialized bodies
• gender

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the adjective “black” in lower case, following Claudia Rankine and most creative writers and scholars of African descent. The lowercase black identifier is generic because it represents a broad range of ethnicities and nationalities, not only African Americans. Hence, its generic function requires a lowercase style.

2 In ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’ (2007) Ahmed describes whiteness as ‘an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they “take up space”’ (150).

3 This study will return to the didactic purpose of data when the inception of Rankine’s hybrid volume is addressed. Since its hybridity is also structural, several textual and visual representative examples that account for a multidimensional creative collage will be provided.

4 Amy Moorman Robbins contends that poetic hybridity, understood as the playful mixing of disparate formal and aesthetic strategies, has been historically associated with male poets and I would add (white) European avant-garde movements. However, her study American Hybrid Poetics (2014) demonstrates that hybrid aesthetics have a firm foundation and a distinct history in the work of radical women poets in the United States. Her book discusses Gertrude Stein, Laura Mullen, Alice Notley, Harryette Mullen and Claudia Rankine; the last two being of African descent.

5 In 2012 Barack Obama introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), as a stopgap executive order that would shield from deportation people who were brought into the United States as children. Those protected under DACA are known as ‘Dreamers’, but the former Trump administration pushed to eliminate this legislation.

6 Titus Kaphar’s paintings reference Classic and Renaissance-style portraiture and at the same time recast accepted representations in the history of Western art. He physically manipulates and transforms his canvases by ripping and cutting them in order to bring to the surface suppressed histories connected with the U.S. racial past and other contemporary concerns. See selected works at: https://www.kapharstudio.com/

7 The photograph is part of Graham’s series American Night (1998–2002). See selected photographs at: https://www.paulgrahamarchive.com/americannight.html#a

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the VPPI-US postdoctoral contract from the University of Seville and the projects FFI2017-84555-C2-2-P Bodies in Transit 2 and Embodiments, Genders and Difference: Cultural Practices of Violence and Discrimination (Ref. 1252965, Junta de Andalucía/FEDER).