Claudia Rankine Brings Her Work off the Page
"On November 4, 2020, poet, essayist, playwright, and editor Claudia Rankine delivered a virtual reading and lecture at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis based on her new book, Just Us: An American Conversation. The event, in the words of Shrem Founding Director Rachel Teagle, 'brought the conversation home to us.'
Chancellor Gary May introduced Rankine and her ability to make space for conversations that may be 'painful, awkward, or difficult, but necessary.' 'It’s up to each of us,' Chancellor May emphasized, 'to seize that opportunity in a way that brings us closer to our reality and our own humanity.' One of the event’s organizers, Professor Allison Coudert, said that 'Claudia forces us to recognize these aggressions for what they are. If we are honest, we simply can’t avert our gaze.'
In a UC Davis News article, Jeffrey Day discussed how Rankine’s most recent book, like previous works of Rankine’s, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric and Citizen: An American Lyric, includes “poetry, essays, photographs, art, scholarship, analysis, invective and argument.” In her informal talk on the making of Just Us Rankine nodded to both the interdisciplinary turn in the humanities and groundbreaking, genre-bending Black feminist work such as M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Rankine’s talk exemplified her unique multimedia style for which she is known in contemporary poetry."