Citizen Hacks: Pages 157-162
What, how, and why you decided to hack in the way you did? At the very end of Citizen, Rankine has a fair amount of blank pages. I decided to preserve that as much as possible because I interpreted that has her taking a pause in the poem before continuing. On the pages where I did annotate, I favored a more traditional form of annotation rather than adopting some of the word… Read More
Pages 103-112
I used a few different techniques for my Citizen hack. The first two pages relied on definitions of terms that were highlighted on the pages. I also tried to combine the idea of sketch-noting certain aspects of the pages in an effort to expound upon key points or emotional moments. The later pages relied heavily on outside information that I brought in, including statistics, quotes, and the names (on the last page)… Read More
Citizen Hack: Cover and Subsequent Pages
I chose to do my hack in black ink. I split the title down the middle. On the left: a list of black men and women who have died due to police brutality. On the right: a list of white supremacists and people who have made publically racist statements. Down the middle the words: you are a, which lead to the word “Citizen.” I made the “other works by Claudia Rankine” into… Read More
Citizen Hack: 68-79
I decided to hack by recognizing the position through which I was hacking as a white woman. I then utilized this perspective by incorporating learning tools that have been helpful for me in learning and understanding race relations in the United States. I focused on specific words and used these as points of departure for larger concepts, the primary one being microaggressions. The strengths were that that annotations essentially “broke it down”… Read More
Citizen Hacked: pages 58 to 65
Citizen, Claudia Rankine, 58-63 The section I worked with from Citizen seemed to focus more directly on the emotions that stem of frequently witnessing micro-aggressions and discriminatory treatment as a person of color, rather then laying out the detailed cultural references as other sections did. The televised tennis match that features in pages 62-65 is a clear reference to Serena Williams, however the focus is on how the “you” interacts with and… Read More
Pages 47-56
I annotated this text as if the reader was an individual with no concept of today’s racism in America, whether that is an American in 100 years, or a resident of another country without a grasp of racism in America. Thus, I annotated both references to images and names literally included by Rankine (Butler, Hurston, Ligon), as well as two annotations explaining the cultural background of America today (no explicit segregation yet… Read More
9-14 Citizen Hack
The way I approached this project was the way I approach a lot of these word/art projects. I decided what I wanted to do was capitalise on emphasis: to choose a few phrases, words, ideas, or images to emphasise in different ways, either to enhance their meaning or change it. I did this in a few different ways. 1) I chose a central image – I guess you could call it… Read More
Citizen Hack: pages 81-90
When deciding what to do for my hack, I tried to approach the book as if I did not know the references—how I imagine someone reading Citizen in the future would. Therefore, I needed to make clear anything that could confuse future readers. The best way to do this was to write in footnotes. My goal was to not detract from Rankine’s work by placing my own flourishes into her book…. Read More
Citizen Hack Pages 91-96
While hacking “Citizen”, focused on annotating the images she used as well as her rendition of the murder of James Craig Anderson. My research on the first image led me from image to poems to jazz music to modern day hip-hop. It’s influence can still be seen and is still relavent. The image, titled “Public Lynching”, inspired the poem “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol which was later sung by Billie Holiday. While… Read More
“We’re in America, last I checked” — Hacking Serena
After randomly picking pages 31-38, the second half of the Serena Williams essay — a topic I consider myself pretty well versed in, due to many years in white tennis spheres — I went all-in, going for a different concept on almost every page, depending on how I thought that page would best be served. Essentially, I tried to pick out things that best illustrated Rankine’s overall argument about microaggressions — how Serena’s… Read More