First-Year Writing Seminar: Poetics of the Citizen

Catalog description

Who gets to be called a citizen? Who is denied the status of citizen and why? How can we define the citizen in ways that elide the state’s legal definition of citizenship? Liberal Western thought has conventionally defined the citizen as an autonomous, self-sufficient individual. Artistic and social movements all over the world have questioned this definition, bringing to light the various human subjectivities (gendered, racialized, and sexualized) that such a conception of the citizen has erased. This course investigates what it means to be a citizen in our present historical moment. Taking our cue from Claudia Rankine’s poetic work Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), we will examine migration, (dis)placement, (dis)orientation, racialization, gender, class, queerness, foreignness, transness, sexuality, creativity, and self-expression. We will work together to craft an alternative definition of the citizen through creative and poetic means. We will think beyond official, state-sanctioned citizenship and contemplate our citizenness as an ethical relation to one another mindful of the power structures that have packaged and labeled us in accordance with a catalogue of social hierarchies. Students will learn to analyze a variety of genres, such as essays, visual culture, fiction, poetry, and film. Authors will include James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima, Frantz Fanon, John Berger, José Muñoz, and, of course, Claudia Rankine. In addition to discussing the assigned readings in class, students will write and revise drafts of formal papers, review each other’s work, compose a found poem, and write less formal in-class essays and reading responses.