The Hypertext of Citizen

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is packed with profound ideas, insightful observations, and unsettling commentary. But the delivery of this content would not be so captivating if not for the book’s unorthodox form. To tell the story of racism in contemporary America in the most impactful way, Rankine and John Lucas have created a hypertextual ecosystem of poetry, prose, and image.

Even the most basic element of the book’s design by John Lucas serve as vital components to Rankine’s vision. The thick, glossy paper looks more fitting for an art catalog, than for a traditional collection of poetry. The unusually large font size adds more weight to the otherwise compact stories and poems, while also allowing the text to breathe. The abundance of white space, both on the cover and inside, contrasts the simple black font, perhaps referencing the leitmotif of Zora Neal Hurston’s “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Together, these elements allow Rankine to present the book as an artistic artifact, setting the appropriate stage for the multidimensional narrative to follow.

This narrative of Citizen is not a linear self-enclosed story told from a singular point of view, but rather a hypertext that connects draws from multiple genres, media, and authors. Rankine incorporates anecdotal shorts along with highly abstracted stream-of-consciousness contemplations, analytic essays, and video scripts to approach the subject of racism from multiple angles, exploring it in terms of both limited personal experience, nation-wide media coverage, and artistic abstraction. To this end, she also uses images as equal narrative elements, rather than mere illustrations. Although sometimes they are referred to in the the text, they are more than just illustrations. Some of the included artwork approaches the topics of racism and the black body through means unavailable to textual communication, complementing the text with visual symbolism. Some pieces, like Glenn Ligon’s etchings, serve as the foundation for Rankine’s writing, originating the ideas she further develops in her text.

Since these images, together with Lucas’s design, are so central to Citizen’s meaning, they raise an interesting question about the role of Rankine’s authorship in this book. Can she be considered as the sole author of Citizen when the work by other artists is such an integral part of the narrative she creates?