Let Us Go

The second chapter explores global citizenship as a practice of exclusion undertaken in part through policies of liberal multiculturalism. In Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine writes an experimental “American lyric” in which the confessional lyric voice is made to contain the micro-aggressions and minoritarian struggles situated within the US but created by a US-manipulated global capitalist economy. The poems in Citizen offer both a diagnosis of the failures of citizenship as an ideal and a staging of the violent “beauty” that emerges from these failures. The poetic transit of Citizen across the Atlantic, and implicitly across the Mediterranean as well, creates the conditions for imagining solidarity between anti-racist movements in the US and ongoing anti-colonial struggles in France and North Africa.