Thank you, Abigail, for starting this week’s discussion. I too, found the relationship between the text and the video very interesting. And in my opinion, the situations videos function to enhance a feeling of continuity that Rankine’s lyric evokes. In Citizen, Rankine discusses not scenes or moments of the experience with racism, but the becoming of the experience.
I thought of Henri Bergson’s theory of cinematographic mechanism when I watched the slow motion video of Zidane headbutting Materazzi and saw the instills of it inserted in the printed book. According to Bergson, the way we perceive the world is similar to the mechanism of a motion picture. That is, we divides the reality into a series of static moments (or concepts), just in the way cinematographers divide movements into a series of pictures. We then splice the moments together and regard the product as a representation of the reality. Bergson argues that this cinematographic approach would not enable us to fully grasp the reality, and we should instead, use our intuition to understand the object of perception.
Though I don’t totally agree with Bergson’s claim that motion pictures are just collections of still pictures, I found his theory inspiring to my reading of Rankine’s Citizen. It seems to me that Rankine is concerned with describing not only the experience with racism, but the continuity of such experience. She tells the whole story of the everyday racism, how it is encountered by black people day by day, instead of depicting the most “racist’ scenes. And in her narrative there is no distinct difference between “racist” acts and “non-racist” acts; racism is a continuity, instead of moments and events that can be seperated from everyday life. For example, she goes to painstaking length to describe Serena’s experience throughout her career, her restraints of rage or the outburst of it, and she points out that “Serena’s behavior, on this particular Sunday afternoon, suggests that all the injustice she has played through all the years of her illustrious career flashes before her and she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of invectives.” The experience with racism is a continuous process, not one moment or one event. Rankins also says in an interview that “In the essay on Serena Williams, one of the things I loved about her is that she wasn’t always right. Sometimes she was wrong but it didn’t matter. What was controlling her behaviour was a history of transgressions against her.” Rankine’ lyrics help us to perceive the experience with racism as something that made up of a memory of the past, a impulse in the present, and a prediction of the future.
And I think this sense of continuity is enhanced more in the situation videos, rather than the disjunctive stills in the printed book. When watching the slow motion of Zidane headbutting Materazzi we can have a feeling that every moment’s experience is connected to that of the next moment and the previous moment. The way Rankin perceive with racism is not to treat it as a concept, but to emphasize (and she encourages people to do so by her use of second person)with the those who experience racism, with intuition. And I think video serve as a good medium to evoke this sympathy and the sense of continuity.
