Just Published: Dr. Kamran Javadizadeh on Claudia Rankine and Robert Lowell

Professor Kamran Javadizadeh was recently published in PMLA, the official publication of the Modern Language Association. His article, “The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject,” arose for Dr. Javadizadeh when he was reading Rankine's Citizen.

"I noticed," said Javadizadeh, "that, tucked into the middle of her book, and in a moment that seemed to me like a reference to the Middle Passage and the history of slavery, Rankine used a phrase—'the Atlantic Ocean breaking on our heads'—that she was clearly (to me at least!) lifting and adapting from a poem by Robert Lowell. But I had no idea what the two moments had to do with each other—and no idea, therefore, why Rankine was turning to Lowell’s language to evoke the history of slavery."

Javadizadeh started digging, and what he found surprised him. "It was when I went back to Lowell’s archive at Harvard and looked at drafts of the poem that my jaw dropped. Race, it turned out, was all over the early drafts of the poem. Rankine—who had never seen these drafts—had nevertheless intuited something genuinely lurking within the poem. She was right! And I could see, as Lowell revised those drafts into the published poem, how much of his poem’s explicit references to race—and all of its references to blackness—had been scrupulously cut away. I felt like I was seeing a poet whom I thought I knew very well through new eyes. And I had Rankine’s poetry to thank for that."

Here is the abstract for the paper:

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discovers new forms of lyric subjectivity by rerouting the expressive lyric’s investment in the singular self, recognized in well-­established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine’s Citizen thus not only helps us see confessional poetry—and the expressive lyric tradition for which it serves as apotheosis—in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that remains alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.