The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind

by Claudia Rankine (Editor), Beth Loffreda (Introduction), Cap Max King (Introduction)

"To think of creativity in terms of transcendence is itself specific and partial—a lovely dream perhaps, but an inhuman one.

"It is not only white writers who make a prize of transcendence, of course. Many writers of all backgrounds see the imagination as ahistorical, as a generative place where race doesn't and shouldn't enter, a place of bodies that transcend the legislative, the economic—in other words, transcend the stuff that doesn't lend itself much poetry. In this view the imagination is postracial, a posthistorical and postpolitical utopia. . . . To bring up race for these writers is to inch close to the anxious space of affirmative action, the scarring qualifieds.

"So everyone is here."—Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, from the introduction

In 2011, a poem published in a national magazine by a popular white male poet made use of a black female body. A conversation ensued, and ended. Claudia Rankine subsequently created Open Letter, a web forum for writers to relate the effects and affects of racial difference and to explore art's failure, thus far, to adequately imagine.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Claudia Rankine is author and editor of more than six collections of poetry and poetics. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor of English at Pomona College.

Beth Loffreda is author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-gay Murder. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Wyoming.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Race, Poetry, Writing, Criticism, Social Justice

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2014

About the author

Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.

Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists and the National Endowment of the Arts. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
(source: Arizona State University)

Reviews

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jericho Brown, from his text Love the Masters:


"Poets whose work supports the status quo often fail to acknowledge that their poems are just as political as poets whose work questions it."



I think this book is incredibly important and everyone should read it.



.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of open letters about writing and race with an excellent critical/theoretical introduction. Perspectives range widely, both racially and in terms of the individual writer's understanding of how race affects their work. I particularly liked Rachel Zucker's letter, in which she responded and then went back and footnoted her response extensively, interrogating basically everything she'd said, deconstructing her own response to the question of race and writing.

[Rachel S · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Note (after writing)--my reviews are also reflections, with forays more personal in context than perhaps what a review typically intends. My objective, generally, is to respond to the work from my experience. I've tried to designate and distinguish the reflecting from the reviewing, after the fact, but it doesn't separate so cleanly.]


~
(Reflecting)

I think this reading experience, for me, is beyond that of the book's scope itself--the project of writing race, (identity, other or self) that it takes; yes, that project is incredibly meaningful and significant to uncover, but this anthology also represents my first dive into the poetic universe. Its significance compounds as I take in for the first time this contemporary room of writers, poets and critics; as I observe and relate to a poet/writer community dialogue--or for that matter, any kind of practitioner community dialogue--for the first time. The irony, that the one aspect of experience that isn't new for this white girl is the deep reflection and unpacking of race.

There was the jargon of the universe--I really was a visiting Martian, in awe of this foreign discourse, rhythm, and name dropping. While I was going to glide over this point, it seemed to merit a moment's observation, as it caught my attention repeatedly. This way of "writing race", dropping words like "poetics", a glimpse of the academy of words. It was startling, sometimes confusing, sometimes distracting in that academic sort of way. But all because it's a world I'm not in, a language I don't use. So reading the writing community became part of this reading experience, beyond just reading writing on writing race.

Reading writing on writing race.

I can already count the number of family members who will hate me if I start talking like this.

For all the foreignness, it was also like coming home. People writing essays in such writerly, literary, (of course, poetic) ways? I could feel my own long-ill-fitted literary rhythm, one I'd sometimes knowingly--awkwardly employ in the social science/social work paper or some other unsuitable context. The style of asyndeton, polysyndeton, or enthusiastic use of dashes, all which I'd excessively pepper my writing with since the 8th grade. I'd toned down the excessive listing of commas and fragments, but some style elements stubbornly persisted. Here were my comrades in idiosyncrasy and element. Piling adjectives and images in the way one does when they love words. Discovering my voice might just have a home.

Like reading a master poem swiftly, reading some of these entries could occur deceptively quickly; in poetic tradition, the authors' word count belying the depth and power of their punch. Many of those punches left me with comments, some of which I mentioned here in my early reading status updates. I won't repost them here, but they inform my overall review of the book. Particularly the laid-bare formatting of the entries that embraced and exposed the structure of the project--its open call.

I hope/plan to return to this with more on the content than the process, and the implications for me as a writer, artist, social justice worker, and human. There's a certain irony in the focus on myself in this review, and absence of racial interrogation; as a white person, and from the book's contents, such a response is oddly myopic and suspect. It's not intended to be comprehensive or complete. And the personal implications are yes, personal. But as we learn here and from the past, feminists and other movements, again and again: personal is political. Jericho Brown writes on how love is political, and political is love.

~
(Reviewing)

Rife with epiphanies and a multitude of voices, the kind that benefits yet also begs more of the hands-off editorial approach employed by Rankine and Loffreda.

Multitudes. We go from writers of color explaining why they don't like to write about race as it is a part of them always, or that they don't necessarily/always have art to make of it, or how they want to be more than their racial signifier; and then we near the end with Bettina Judd, who infuses her physicality into the book and writing process, her rounded brown hand connecting to paper. In the honest and lovely ways of qualitative and humanistic methods (geez--social work schooling--escaping soon) the thesis or result is not a single idea but the manifold humanness of racial imaginaries, racial (writing/creative) identities.

On that note-- I don't think they're the same thing. I'm pretty sure I'm wrong somehow, or still ignorant to the lexicon, but racial imaginary feels to me like individual and also collective writerly consciousness about race-in-writing. This could just be my processing and digesting of it all, they could be the same, but the identity/perspective/experience that Judd describes feels distinct from a racial imaginary--it feels exactly that, an identity. Not a project of writing, or a practice. But the self, deeper and more intrinsic and fundamental than a literary imagination or undertaking. Again, I'm not in the literary world, so I don't know.

[Susan Merrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for the Stony Brook MFA faculty's book club, and am so glad I did. Without providing answers (a smarter book than that), this collection of essays raises a multitude of questions about race and the way we live in the world as writers of all colors, and it is no bullshit great. So looking forward to talking this book over with my colleagues.

[Lisa Eckstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm interested in the topics tackled in this anthology: how writers address fraught subjects, how to engage in discussions about race, how to write well about and across racial differences. In these essays, writers (mostly poets) reveal how race impacts (or doesn't) their work and their careers. The wide range of viewpoints and approaches make this a great anthology to read, study, and contemplate. The book itself is beautifully designed and includes artwork selected for its relevance to the topics under discussion.

The pieces in this collection are all thoughtful and unflinching. Many of the essayists discuss how difficult these subjects are to write about, or even to consider, and many reveal personal moments of shame or hurt. This book doesn't set out to be a how-to guide for writers (if you're looking for that, I recommend WRITING THE OTHER by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward as a good starting point), but I found it helpful in thinking about my own writing. I recommend it to any writer or reader.

[Kristin Canfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ooh I'm imagining using this book as an anchor text for so many different types of classes.

[jq · Rating 3 out of 5]

SOOOO much has changed since 2011 holy shit. reading this was often bewildering. there were so, so, so many more white people in this book than i could ever have imagined, and i was struck and taken aback by how fragile they are here, how much everything is about them and their feelings of inadequacy and anxiety and shame, like oh my god. i appreciated rachel zucker's essay's use of footnotes and the reflections that she added - thank goodness for her friend that gave her feedback, a friend i can only imagine is a person of color but this is actually not noted in the footnotes (guilt at asking her friend of color to do labor for her? did zucker pay her for her time? lol), but it still got so grating and exasperating, the self-absorption of so many of these perspectives. i'm so glad that today i don't have to deal with anywhere near as much of the kind of stuff expressed in this book, it's still there but that i can recuse myself and not have to tiptoe around or constantly accommodate the pathetic and small crises of people who need their hand held through everything. anyways, some of the essays were really interesting and obviously a worthwhile project as a whole. notes i took:

“The language of rights is as extraordinary as it is popular, and it is striking to see how many white writers in particular conceive of race and the creative imagination as the question of whether they feel they are permitted to write a character, or a voice, or a persona, ‘of color.’” (loffreda and rankine, 15)

“It should also conversely not be assumed that it is easy or natural to write scenarios or characters whose race matches (whatever that might mean) one’s own. This is the trap that writers of color in particular still must negotiate; it’s the place where ‘write what you know’ becomes plantational in effect.” (loffreda and rankine, 17)

“So not: can I write from another’s point of view? But instead: to ask why and what for, not just if and how? What is the charisma of what I feel estranged from, and why I might wish to enter and inhabit it. To speak not in terms of prohibition and rights, but desire. To ask what we think we know, and how we might undermine our own sense of authority. To not simply assume that the most private, interior, emotional spaces of existence—the spaces that are supposed to be the proper material of the lyric and the fictive—are most available for lyric and fictive rendering because they are somehow beyond race.” (loffreda and rankine, 17-18)

“We wish to also unsettle the assumption that it is easy or simple to write what one ‘is.’ Why might I assume it is easy to write what is nearest to me? How do I know what that is—and what do I miss when I keep familiar things familiar? It should be difficult to write what one knows—and if it is too easy, it is worth asking if that is because one is reproducing conventions and assumptions rewarded by the marketplace of literature.” (loffreda and rankine, 18)

“In that moment, writers and readers of color may feel profound and mutual anxieties that all people of color are about to be locked in, no matter who wrote it. But especially if a white writer wrote it. This anxiety is fueled by the fact that racism, in its very dailyness, in its very variety of expression, isn’t fixed. It’s t’s there, and then it’s not, and then it’s there again. One is always doing the math: Was it there? Was it not? What just happened? Did I hear what I thought I heard? Should I let it go? Am I making too much of it? Racism often does its ugly work by not manifesting itself clearly and indisputably, and by undermining one’s own ability to feel certain of exactly what forces are in play. This happens in reading as it does everywhere else. In a sense, it doubles-down the force of race—you feel it, you feel the injury, the racist address, and then you question yourself for feeling it. You wonder if you’ve made your own prison.” (19)

“I rarely feel like a good writer when I’m writing about race. But I’m not writing to feel like a good writer. I’m trying to figure something out, make something that didn’t exist before.” (casey llewellyn, 44)
—> Questions for myself: Am I writing to feel like a good writer? Is writing about ‘making something that didn’t exist before?’
(Thinking of my interest in the quote from Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne, trans. Joel Agee. As I wrote in my journal: ‘He says, Just write the thing, “… in no way is this the time to say something new about Rodin.”’ And I found that really compelling. But of course all writing is something that didn’t exist before, that’s just a fact, even the monkey’s typewritten Shakespeare is not the same Shakespeare. Something that didn’t exist before =/= saying something new.)

“For me it boils down to /where do I live/ in a poem.” (sadoff, 240)

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading; a diverse group of poets and writers discuss how race is approached or avoided in our work, in our lives, and the areas where they intersect. Among many other topics and branches of the discussion of race, I particularly appreciated a frank look at "whiteness" and how it manifests, erases, or frames so many interactions and expectations, and what we can do to move away from the "whiteness-as-default" mindset in writing and in life; not to mention how to think about doing a better job supporting and listening to to those unlike ourselves or marginalized in society as well as literary and academic circles.

[Gabrielle Bates · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific collection of letters and essays. Totally transformed how I think as a writer. Among the many challenging gifts this book gave me was that it brought to light many of the (damaging) tropes white writers often turn to when attempting to write about issues of race and racism. The voices assembled here speak to a wide range of perspectives; they do not all agree, and as a reader, you must grapple with each one on its own terms, listening and questioning.

[Jacob Binder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the contributors understood the assignment better than others, but I still praise their vulnerability and their intention in answering the organizing questions on race and literature that Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda pose. Together these essays and open letters make up a trove of critical thought desperately needed in the literary world, still some twevle years after this project began...

[Krys]

Outstanding foreword and a wonderful breadth of writing that attempts to tackle speaking/writing about race. My copy is marked with lots of stickers and underlined passages. The section on 'Readings' was particularly illuminating, and I'll be thinking about parts of this book for a long time.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important and illuminating essay collection that examines what writing about race, or with race in mind, should or might be. The range of opinions and life experiences presented here is deeply affecting.

[Sylvia]

Essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or otherwise leads a thinking life.

[S.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The intro is pretty dense, but don't let that dissuade you. This is an excellent read.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting collection to read and look through (includes photos of different types of art as well as letters and essays)--all in response to an open letter/questions by poet Claudia Rankine on writing and race. I found many of the responses in the book thought-provoking, although many of them were way too stuck inside the stultifying language confines of 'academese'--and thus, not so broadly accessible.

[Corrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I didn't have time to deeply read this, the good chunk of entries (essays? blog posts? some are more 'free-form' than others) I did read were thought-provoking and worth my time. The art! Get this just so you have an excuse to look at some great contemporary art that investigates questions of race.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful, provocative, essential collection of essays and art that address how writers might/can/should approach questions of race. The collection is wide-ranging (and even contradictory) by design. Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap have done all of us a great favor with this book.

[Hannah Notess · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is worth picking up just for the introduction, which is incredibly clear-eyed about writing and race - I would unhesitatingly recommend it to any literary writer.

The quality of the pieces in the anthology vary (which is normal and as an editor of an anthology I feel I can say this is normal), as do the form, but there's lots of good food for thought and meaningful reflection.