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Summer Book Club with Susan Stein | Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric & Just Us: An American Conversation
Wednesday, July 14, 2021 @ 4:00 pm EDT
What does it mean to be a citizen in conversation about whiteness in America? Join CWB’s Summer Book Club double-header read of Citizen: An American Lyric and Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine. These two books are brilliant and provocative; they are also quite challenging reads for their style, structure and content. Let’s work together to unpack them! Rankine creates portraits that weave essays, poems and images to invite us, one conversation at a time, to face whiteness in America. Together we will think about how each of us is a citizen in many different ways and the role personal transformation plays. With CWB Resident Teaching Artist Susan Stein we talk about our selves and our historical selves, personal and political while looking at Rankine’s unique frame by frame books that ask us to consider Microaggressions and the unseen ways racism lives in our society. Reading Citizen, part prose poem, part journal entry, part photographs, and Just Us, an assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images, we will consider how Rankine’s multi-faceted approach shapes the way each text we encounter can be both window and mirror. Never telling us what to do, she urges us to begin a discussion. We will use her books to do just that.
Each session will run approximately 60 minutes.
Reading Schedule:
June 16: Read through Book (Chapter) V, Citizen, p. 79
June 23: Complete Citizen
June 30: Just US
July 7: Just US
July 14: Final Session
About the books:
Citizen: An American Lyric
Finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Poetry
Winner of the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
Finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism
Winner of the 2015 PEN Open Book Award
Winner of the 2015 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry
Claudia Rankine’s bold recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
To purchase Citizen: Amazon | Private Online Book Seller | or purchase at your local book store!
Just Us: An American Conversation
As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.
Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces—the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth—where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.
This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.
Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
To purchase Just Us | Amazon | Private Online Book Seller | or purchase at your local book store!
These titles are eligible for the CWB book reimbursement stipend for classroom educators only. (Up to $100 in a calendar year- participation in the program is required.)
Susan Stein is an actor, playwright and teaching artist in NYC. Stein has spent the past eight years touring her original play, Etty, directed by Austin Pendleton, to theaters, universities, schools and prisons throughout the United States and parts of Europe. Stein has been an Artist/Scholar in residence at Cambridge University, Duquesne, Boston College, Vanderbilt and Chapman University. She leads workshops in writing and acting throughout the US and UK. Susan studied acting at NYU Graduate School and SUNY Purchase and received a Master’s in Writing at Wesleyan University. She was on the faculty of Princeton Day school for 13 years.