My first entry into my English Major showcase is an essay on a work I loved to read, in a class I loved to attend. It’s a “Close Reading Analysis” that I did on a chapter in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. This was for Major Brown’s “Genre Studies: Poetry” class in the spring semester of 2016, when I was a Third. I chose this work because I think it really helps show the range of rhetorical practices (poetry analysis) that I’ve undertaken as an English Major, as well as an awareness of cultural/historical influences, in this case the racism that Rankine experienced as a black woman in New England and Southern California, as well as the systemic racism that affects untold millions of other people of color.

In the essay, I explore how Rankine brings these issues of race, and more explicitly the issue of erasure, into the text subtly, and in her unusual second person style. A style that breaks in this chapter from one of prose poetry, into that of verse. Here’s an excerpt that I think shows what I mean;

This talk of bodies, of “fevered history,” and of erasure, all seem to me, to allude to the greater conversation about race that Rankine is having in the rest of “Citizen,” and that America is having as a whole. It doesn’t have to say anything explicit about race, because the language alone conjures up images of systemic abuse and the denial of personhood, not just of an individual, but of “all of our fevered history.” Rankine uses the first person plural here to show that it’s not just the speaker’s problem, or the reader’s problem, but that it’s our problem, a people’s problem.