Anguish in Language: Pain as a Biocultural Experience in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric

Abstract:

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) represents physical pain as a multidimensional experience entwined with history, language, and culture. By linking descriptions of anti-Black racist encounters with the imagery of somatic aches, Rankine blurs the boundaries between psychological suffering and physical distress to offer readers a nuanced depiction of the way racist discourse can both cause and, most crucially, shape one's private perception of corporeal agony. She zeros in on the experience of headaches to represent the interwoven relationship between the psycholinguistic contours of thought and bodily hurt, insisting that physical pain is more than a physiological alarm whose essence lies outside of language and culture.