On pages 52
& 53 of Citizen is the image of Glenn
Ligon’s untitled oil stick, gesso,
and graphite on wood, borrowing a quote from Zora Neale Hurston: “I DO NOT
ALWAYS FEEL COLORED” on one side, “I FEEL MOST COLORED WHEN I AM THROWN AGAINST
A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND” on the other. The letters are all black, and, at the
top of the page, the background is white. By halfway down the page, the
background is smudged and splattered in black, and, by the time eyes reach the
bottom, the black has grown so that the letters are nearly illegible. Citizen is made up, largely, of lived experiences;
whether Rankine herself or friends or family lived them is unclear, but what we
are to draw from this genre-bending book is that, for Black people, to navigate
the United States’ racism is a series of unending performances, reactions to
and against others’ actions. Rankine examines this tension between hypervisibility
and invisibility—this tension which Ligon’s untitled
portrays, and which we’ve discussed at many other points throughout the
semester. On page 55, Rankine’s speaker, or Rankine-as-speaker writes, “you
take in things you don’t want to all the time” after a friend tells her “you
have to learn not to absorb the world.” The visuals in Citizen lend an interpretive hand, but not one we can control: we
are asked to “take things in.”
Throughout Citizen,
Rankine masterfully examines the daily effort of existing-as-performance, asking
that readers stand witness to the everyday racism the speaker tolerates. Over
and over, we read as the speaker is mistaken for someone else, as the speaker
is not who someone expects them to be, as the speaker is expected to laugh at
racist jokes, as the speaker is the sole viewer of “invisible” racism. The speaker,
who is often a universal “you,” not an “I,” fights for the right to be nuanced,
to be a whole self; this speaker makes careful distinctions between bendably-alike
terms: “it wasn’t a match, I say,” she writes on the last page, “It was a
lesson” (159). I think part of what Citizen
does most effectively is trouble our notions of the absolute human existence which
is so often taken for granted in the white lived experience—that for someone, something
as “simple” as sitting in a car (here, I am again referencing the last page)
can be an act of menace in the eyes of someone else, a source of trouble or
power or selfhood for the one doing the sitting. According to Rankine, every
second of every day can be very much more than a simple existence, no matter
how seemingly quotidian.
In the
Introduction chapter to Troubling Vision:
Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Nicole Fleetwood offers a helpful
elaboration on the “polyvalent meaning” of the word render, in reference to black visuality: “to give help; to
translate; to deliver a verdict; to submit for consideration; to purify through
extraction; to surrender something; to exchange or give something back—as they
each contribute to an understanding of the visual, viewed and viewing black
subject” (7). Here, and after Fleetwood references Wahneema Lubiano’s
theorizing that “telling the ‘truth’ demands that we consider the truth of
something compared to something else,” I had margin notes about how similar
this felt to Shane Vogel’s concepts of the “real” and “authentic” (5). To be “real”
or to be “rendered” is to be understood by an outside group as such—“real” or “rendered”
and “existing” are not synonymous. So, if we are to understand that “truth,”
“reality,” “authenticity” (etc.) are matters of nuanced performance, not binaries
of good & bad, should we not be concerned with doing a form of close listening?
Here, I mean listening as a way to approach visuality (and visual
performance/performance cues) that is complicated, curious, and thus less natural,
perhaps, than simply looking at it. As Fleetwood suggests, “how do we return to
what we already know with curiosity and openness so that new forms of knowing
and recognition emerge?” (7). I ask: how does one listen critically to a book
of text which defies boundaries of genre and selfhood? Is close listening a companion to visuality or a challenge to it?
To end, I
would like to provide two examples of “video poetry,” where visual performance(s)
(of race) are central to both the original poetry's content and the video which couples it. Senna Yee, who is Chinese-Canadian, and Monica McClure, who is Mexican-American, both use visuals to supplement, complicate, compliment, or otherwise, to
borrow from Fleetwood, “render,” the poem itself. I’d like us to think about
how this visual interacts with the visuals throughout Citizen—in what ways do these visuals compare/contrast/interact with
each other? How do they complicate our ideas of what it means to be a visible,
legible, person?
Senna Yee, book trailer for "How Do I Look?"
Monica McClure, "Chiflada"
Jane,
ReplyDeleteIt's really interesting how you incorporate poetry into the visual and sonic here, as it builds substantially on the way I think many people are taught to think of poetry: how does it sound in terms of the rhyme and rhythm, and what is the structure of the rhyme scheme (or at least, that was the case for me). Instead, your approach both scopes that out but also emphasizes the utility of listening to the "image" of the poem as well as the types of visuals that might accompany them. I was particularly struck by the use of two games in Sennah Yee's video, one from a genre coded heavily as "masculine" (seemingly a kind of online shooting game with some avatar customization) and the other as "feminine" (an avatar building/dress game). Notably, for the latter, some of these games are also heavily pornographied, which is interesting on its own in how things coded as feminine and the pornographic can be conflated, especially in context of the question, "How Do I Look?". Both speak to a kind of being watched even when one is creating some kind of avatar, and how the quotidian activities of running and dressing in games take on new contexts, as well as the possibilities of representing one self through avatars in digital spaces. (David R. Dietrich's "Avatars of Whiteness: Racial Expression in Video Game Characters" is a great example of this for those who want to read more).
And then, there's how this expression of the quotidian and its transformations takes place in Citizen, as you discussed. I was particularly struck by the commentary on Serena Williams, and the moment(s) of justifiable frustration that exist in a context. Particularly, the politics of being watched and seen as they relate to rules, how Williams' foot on the line was hyperpoliced for her by the line judge in a way that is obvious to Rankine (and, hopefully, us as readers) as being related to her being a black woman. The mode of how the line judge watches Williams for restriction, vs. how Rankine watches in a broader context that exists against empathy, points to the way that seeing stems from a context, particularly in the minuteau. I think this commentary on seeing and context in details (in digital or non-digital spaces, although one might argue that Rankine's experience of the match is digital) travels across what you're discussing in a way that is helpful for understanding the intersection of race and performance as we're discussing it in this class.
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteI was similarly drawn to the Glenn Ligon’s Untitled: Four Etchings. As you ask us to think about the performatics of the visual and visuality and whether close listening is a “companion to visuality or a challenge to it,” I found myself thinking about the relationship between visuality and what Tina Campt calls the “undervalued lower range of quotidian audibility” (95). In particular, with the Ligon piece, I found myself thinking, not only what is the visuality of black text on a white background where the text becomes increasingly blurred, smudged, and illegible, but also the audibility of this text. Does the blurred text constitute a kind of “static”, or is it a form of audibility altogether different from “static,” which is sometimes called “white noise”? Put differently, when we listen closely to the blurred text, does a form of intense quiet emerge, one that registers on a different frequency and out of the tension between invisibility and hypervisibility? I am thinking here, as well, of the relation between static and stasis, wherein the former constitutes a type of stillness while Campt defines the latter as a type of motion in stillness:
ReplyDelete1. tensions produced by holding a complex set of forces in suspension.
2. unvisible motion held in tense suspension or temporary equilibrium; e.g., vibration (653).
I find Campt’s definition of stasis and her mobilization of sonic historiography especially helpful in challenging the deeply troubled and racialized histories of white Western ways of seeing.
I’m interested, too, in how modes of listening challenge what we understand to be citizenship, or a belonging in the here and how, which Rankine herself troubles through the lyric in ways that both grapple with the racist imaging of black people while offering the audible as a kind of refrain that holds in tension the racist present and the struggle for a black futurity. Here, I’m thinking of the multiple expressions of the “Yes, and” as both acknowledgement and gesture forward, or affirmation and refusal: “Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stranger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile” (16); “Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself” (17); “Yes, and this is how you are a citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on” (151). The “yes, and” both acknowledges and affirms the experience of racial injustice that abounds from being the object of a racializing gaze while the conjunction also sets up a grammar of futurity, of what is to come, of what it takes to keep going, or what Campt calls “living the future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive—as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present” (266).
Some thoughts in response to Jane’s post, Addison’s reply, and this week’s texts:
ReplyDeleteFirstly, Addison I’m glad you pointed us to the Serena Williams section of Rankine (II). In reading this section, I had to return to inquire as to the publication date of this text : 2014. Rankine (and/or the lyric’s speaker) conveys such magnitude of rightful indignation -- yet also a weariness to this disbelief, which has come to converge with a (near) lack of shock in the happenings if not acceptance of their motivating factors -- in her depiction of the escalation and cyclicity of Williams’ battle with racist and racialized “policing” of her body, voice, expressions, modalities, volumes, and frequencies (in the term’s dual meaning) that I couldn’t stomach the notion that this all was written prior to the recent 2018 iteration/manifestation. For those possibly unaware, Williams was defeated in the US Open Final in September 2018 by virtue of a game penalty. Her competitor, Japan’s Naomi Osaka (who has long considered Williams her idol), was visibly/visually and audibly overwhelmed by the circumstances of her win.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCm3BemDlj8
Footage of trophy ceremony
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-EQBFt7nks
CNN station and reporters dis-allow footage of Serena speaking/acting for herself, instead voicing over “static”* images (and fixating upon the “truth” of Williams’ statement about not receiving coaching). Network itself fails to contextualize in terms of events, citing Williams statement “Things like this always happen to me here” as insinuation rather than confirmation of historical record and patterns (also feature no previous footage of past events or previous statements by Williams regarding such events). The voice of Christine Brennan, sports columnist, is featured; she states:
“We may end up with a positive here, Serena’s sportsmanship after the fact...was exactly pitch-perfect...it sounds like she really was trying to moving everybody forward, and that is a positive step. But she has a legitimate beef … that we can safely say is not going away” (while she is the only who asserts “legitimacy,” the rhetoric here -- including that of ultimate recuperation and emphasis on futurity -- is complicated/circumspect.
*While I support/am convinced by Campts’ nuancing of the seemingly static and silent (via a “listening” attention to the vibrant materiality of an image, an awareness and exposure of its archival practices and the historical formations which prompts and policed its existence), I am bothered by this use of images instead of footage in terms of the likely intended deprivation/refusal/over-writing of Williams’ voice and movements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwcMuXmgcY
Rather uncomfortable NBC News interview with Osaka some days after the match (her feelings are articulated and policed for her)
See also “the” cartoon and resulting backlash cartoons (however, the Herald Sun responded to criticism regarding the cartoon by re-disseminating it and making it part of a feature in which the “PC Zone” kills satire and more) (It is my intention to post them here but tbd on whether my understanding of site enables this in a response)...
All this to say, that Rankine’s Part II was published four entire years prior to this reincarnation, already marking a cyclicity of history, resonated with poignant horror. As stated in Citizen leading up to the introduction of “you” watching Serena Williams, “You begin to think, maybe erroneously, that this other kind of anger is really a type of knowledge: the type that both clarifies and disappoints. It responds to insult and attempted erasure simply by asserting presence” which is an energy “accompanied by vioserable disappointed : a disappointment in the sense that no amount of visibility will alter the ways in which one is perceived” (24) -- no amount of visibility, including the testament of historical events or Rankine’s own text/expose. (“Yes, and the body has memory....” (28) in the face of institutional archives which refuse to remember).
DeleteSomewhat similarly, in thinking through the Campt (particularly the Coda), I am realizing I’m possibly less comfortable with a “recuperative” or generative reading of the cyclic or iterative (see for example Bliss Cua Lim re. Remake cycles, which is articulated incredibly well and has been very compelling in terms of my work on cultural adaptation and queer temporality) than I used to be -- that is, such historic iterativity has and continues to cause severe consequences -- including premature death and generational trauma -- for certain peoples (namely, Black persons in/of the diaspora, in the United States, etc). Campt states: “The [“rhythmic”] seriality of the untimely forfeiture of black and brown lives to incarceration or premature mortality has become an urgent refrain that echoes backward and frozen in time,” 107. I am left debating whether theorizing the generative capacities of the iterative is a reclaiming of sorts, or whether it is/can be mobilized to excuse lack (ie refusal) of dramatic change.
Finally, I’m curious as to how Campt’s work fits into, or more likely nuances, the Afrofuturism and Afro-Pessimism debates, particularly in its emphasis on refusal in the service of a futurity/liveable imaginary. She questions, “How do we create an alternative future by living both the future we want to see, while inhabiting its potential foreclosure at the same time?” while admitting the such a historic “line of continuity...makes it difficult to theorize black futurity” (107) (see also 109).
Also, resource dump -- I found this blog-type series by Campt (discusses frequency, etc):
ReplyDeletehttps://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/154905_tina_campt
Jane, I’m grateful for the way you frame Rankine’s Citizen specifically through the Ligon piece; as I had a similar reading experience, in that (for me) Hurston’s words mobilized the larger project of the book. Christine Sharpe, in her 2016 book on the wake as metaphor for black experience (highly recommend!), describes the position of the black body as always facing toward and bracing from death, always in mourning. Because black communities survive “ in occupation” they are comprised of “no-citizens” (22). I don’t believe this to be in contradiction to Rankine but rather in collusion. It was a helpful way for me to think through the tension of what Jane mentions above, the invisibility and hypervisibility of being black.
ReplyDeleteI also think it helpful to discuss/process Rankine’s use of form, how that form engages Campt’s low frequencies, and how it uniquely facilitates reiterative expressions of mourning. And to be clear, I don’t believe reiteration is repetition. They are not synonyms; the former signals flexivity and futurity (e.g., Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout” is a piece that reiterates, its power emerging from its echo) while the latter suggests replication of the past, the redo. All this to say, I think reiteration, as we conceive of it through mourning and occupation, finds salience alongside Campt’s low frequencies. And I think it enacts the powerful structures of Citizen. Campt writes, “Refocusing our attention on their sonic and haptic frequencies and on the grammar of black fugitivity and refusal that they enact reveals the expressiveness of quiet, the generative dimensions of stasis, and the quotidian reclamations of interiority, dignity, and refusal marshaled by black subjects in their persistent striving for futurity” (11). I want to be careful in saying there’s something quiet about Citizen, but I do think the text, through its reiterative accounts of microaggression, the elegiac memorials, even (but maybe especially) her analytic attendance to Serena Williams, evokes living under occupation, that is, being thrown (again and again) against the sharp white background. So perhaps “quiet” is not the most operative word. But there’s a collective thrumming in Citizen that could fall under Campt’s definition of “stasis,” the vibration produced by “holding a complex set of forces in suspension” and/or “unvisible motion held in tense suspension or temporary equilibrium” (51).
I’m curious what others think about Rankine’s form, its incorporation of both the visual and lyrical, its affective investments, and whether it engages Campt’s methodology of listening to images.
Jane,
ReplyDeleteI am particularly drawn to the questions you pose at the end of this post about the possible relations between the practice of listening and visual objects–even more after my reading of Henriques’ book. Last week, while we were discussing what exactly does Campt’s invitation of listening entail, an image came to my mind: in performances of classical music, it is common to see people from the audience sitting with their eyes closed (I've always been fascinated by this sight). This is a somewhat common practice by which listeners attempt to attune themselves to what is happening in the room, to discover sounds that might otherwise get buried under excessive sensory stimulation and occasional distractions. This, in a way, is also a performance of closely and quietly listening (in this case, listening to sounds). Campt’s gesture in her book, to me, seems akin to that of the “sleeping listeners” of classical music, with the difference that in her case, rather than refusing all visual stimuli, she’s tuning out the loudest, dominant readings of images and allowing herself to sit with and be affected by their quietest meanings. Maybe this is more like squinting (curiously, I have noticed that sometimes I squint when I cannot listen to someone or somewhat clearly enough).
Connected to this, while reading Listening to Images, I could not avoid relating Campt’s approach to the visual to Roland Barthes’ distinction between studium and punctum in Camera Lucida. In his book, Barthes argues that aesthetic conventions do not have much to do with what “moves us” in an image. He introduces studium and punctum as two different ways of engaging with the visual (photographs in particular). For Barthes, studium refers to the conventions that make an image legible to its viewer, what allows us to recognize what is in the picture and perceive it as familiar and relevant. This is sometimes connected to conventions and formal decisions (framing, lightning, etc.). On the other hand, Barthes defines punctum as a haptic and affective relation: “For punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole –and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (27). Punctum is provoked by details that might or might not be equally evident to all viewers. These details do not have to signal intention–of the photographer, of the photographed subject. Campt’s interest on the bodily tensions of the women on the Marianhill photographs or on the gestures of prisoners resonates with Barthes’ notion of punctum as a haptic way of relating to images.