States of emergency/states of emergence: Notes on Claudia Rankine

This article considers Claudia Rankine’s representation of racial violence and the culture of white supremacy in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and Citizen: An American Lyric. Beginning from her conviction of the fundamental connection between white supremacist thinking and the enclosure of black life within the social death of slavery, it explores the consequences for both black and white identity of white fantasies of absolute sovereignty. Central to Rankine’s elaboration of these questions, the article maintains, is her virtuosic reconfiguring of lyric form to expose the ideological and discursive mechanisms that organise American racial reality.