Situation, Occasion, Encounter: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Lyric Theory in the Historical Present

© 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System t a rally in Springfield, Illinois, on November 9, 2015, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered his speech in front of a racially diverse audience. By “in front of,” I do not mean “before” or “facing.” The stage was not a proscenium, but in a now-common configuration for televised political campaign speeches, a platform in the center of stadium-style seating. The audience visible on-screen was not in front of the candidate, facing him, but seated behind him as a strategically positioned, demographically curated backdrop of listeners, about half white and half people of color. The mise-enscène: a clumsy illusion of diverse populations backing Trump. Following the rally, images of the event circulated on social media, but not because of the commonplace hypocrisy of a politician deploying for political gain the very bodies he rhetorically denigrates (a posture we might call racist fidelity rather than racist irony). Instead the scene went viral because of an unusual disruption in the background: the reading of a book of poetry at a political event.1