A Critical Reading of the Concept of Essentialism in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

Abstract

This dissertation undertook the explanatory approach to make a relation between the idea of Essentialism and the act of Racism, investigating the American lyric titled Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) by Claudia Rankine to find this interrelation between the two terms in contemporary American society and African American community in particular. Since most previous researchers have mainly focused on reading the book from a stylistic- based approach to illustrate the striking styles used by the author and to highlight what they symbolize or refer to, this dissertation tends to answer a broader question about the reasons that stimulate the racist acts. This dissertation employs Gayatri Spivak’s ideas about race and essentialists’ beliefs to shed more light on Essentialism as a concept as well as a belief and investigate why it is a major reason for Racism. Consequently, this dissertation concluded that the racist acts were stimulated by the essential beliefs that human beings were raised on and it was not possible at the moment to end Racism because human psyche needed time to change completely especially in the case of the essential beliefs. Moreover, there was a proportional correlation between Essentialism and Racism; in other words, based on the human attachment to their essential beliefs, the acts of Racism would be more violent and out of control. On the grounds of this conclusion, a number of recommendations were put forward to shed more light on the link between Essentialism and Racism and their impact on human civilization