Claudia Rankine – författare

Att vara människa är att vilja delta, även om det innebär att du öppnar dig för ett våldsamt, sårande tilltal från världen. Att vara medborgare är att förväntas delta, även när samhället du lever i fängslar, skadar, dödar kroppar som ser ut som din. Medborgare är ett litterärt vittnesbörd om hur rasismen genomsyrar våra dagliga liv och en av de senaste årens mest lästa och omtalade amerikanska poesiböcker. Med en blandning av poesi, prosa, essä och bild naglar Rankine fast problematiken i att vara den andre, och utmanar förståelsen av begreppet medborgarskap. Exemplen kommer från framgångsrika personer som Serena Williams och Zinedine Zidane likaväl som från TV, kön i matvarubutiken och klassrummet.

Boken har tilldelats en mängd priser, bland annat National Book Critics Circle Award och PEN Open Book Award.

Översättare: Marie Silkeberg och Jenny Tunedal

Att vara människa är att vilja delta, även om det innebär att du öppnar dig för ett våldsamt, sårande tilltal från världen. Att vara medborgare är att förväntas delta, även när samhället du lever i fängslar, skadar, dödar kroppar som ser ut som din. Medborgare är ett litterärt vittnesbörd om hur rasismen genomsyrar våra dagliga liv och en av de senaste årens mest lästa och omtalade amerikanska poesiböcker. Med en blandning av poesi, prosa, essä och bild naglar Rankine fast problematiken i att vara den andre, och utmanar förståelsen av begreppet medborgarskap. Exemplen kommer från framgångsrika personer som Serena Williams och Zinedine Zidane likaväl som från TV, kön i matvarubutiken och klassrummet.

Boken har tilldelats en mängd priser, bland annat National Book Critics Circle Award och PEN Open Book Award.

Översättare: Marie Silkeberg och Jenny Tunedal

* Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry ** Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry * Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism * Winner of the NAACP Image Award * Winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize * Winner of the PEN Open Book Award *ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, NPR. Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, Slate, Time Out New York, Vulture, Refinery 29, and many more . . .A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine''s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don''t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Claudia Rankine''s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming 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.

A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars—doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age.First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy.Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness—a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence.

A groundbreaking new direction for Claudia Rankine, the best-selling author of Citizen and Just UsClaudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, "collapse" takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. "No matter our posture," Rankine writes, "we are all among the rubble." This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTIONClaudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation—Just Us urges all of us into itAs 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.