I found this assignment to be extremely difficult.  How could I, as a white, young male, possibly “hack” into a work created by a black woman without altering and undermining the integrity of her own work with my own limited viewpoint and understanding? In order to show my inability, or the inability of any white person, to fully understand and respect Claudia Rankine’s work, I had alienated the word “you.”  For… Read More

This final section includes a list of “Images,” “Works Referenced,” acknowledgements, and a quick author bio. In sum, it cites the contemporary sources (monetary, digital, and otherwise) that helped Rankine create this work. As this is a Word-Art class, I decided to focus on her 4-page inventory of the images that she peppers throughout the text. I was essentially charged with annotating Rankine’s annotations. The contemporary cultural references had been factually explained to… Read More

  In hacking these particular pages, it was important to me to not take too much attention away from the personal anecdotes. I didn’t want to write over them, but I did want to pick out individual words and phrases that might otherwise be overlooked and not deeply considered for their intentions and associations.  To that end, my annotations mostly took the form of definitions that broaden the meaning of the text… Read More

For my hack of Rankine’s Citizen I wanted to combine an academic mode of annotation (footnotes) with a more subjective and interpretive visual style. A consistent edit I made was placing constricting arrows pointing onto and crowding the text of the names of all black people mentioned and arrows pointing outward from the names of all the white people mentioned. I did this to symbolize the ever present “white space” and how it marginalizes… Read More