Here is a list of updated questions for Paper 3. Let’s use this space as requested to give feedback to each other, and to really get to the heart of what makes a good (compelling, original, debatable, significant, focused) question.

• In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine places unnatural images and stories of erasure together to draw attention to the relationship between white perceptions of beauty and psychological erasure of black bodies. (Clara)
• How does Claudia Rankine use second person narrative and images with historical content as a way to create more intimate relationships between races and within a race, respectively, in order to overcome discomfort about the discussion of race? (Tatiana)
• In a lyric written about the lives of black people and the struggles they face in modern America, how does Rankine use white, or negative, space, coupled with often dark images and black text, as a larger metaphor for her book? (Sammy)
• How does Rankine depict breath as central to her experience of the racialized world? How does the inability to breathe connect itself with lack of space, environmental insecurity, and Hurston’s “sharp white background” to represent Rankine’s emotional and environmental suffocation? (Rhys)
• How does Claudia Rankine use words and space to examine how occupation of space and spatial awareness prolongs and intensifies racial divides?   (Kaila)
• How does Rankine use the particular visual medium of photographs in Citizen to reflect the feelings of alienation from the population that are prevalent in modern American black society? (Justin)
• How does the Avant-­Garde form in which Rankine writes her Lyric, accentuate its meaning and underlying message to white people about subconscious racism and the history of racism in America? (Skylar)
• How does Toomer’s experimental use of color, specifically in reference to physical appearance, reflect his vision of a new hybrid race, beyond constructs of black and white? (Jaden)
• How does Rankine’s deliberate placement of white spaces in contrast to blackness actively engage the reader and promote the acknowledgement of race as opposed to color-blindness? (Isabelle)
• Does the modernist structure of Jean Toomer’s Cane repress the reader that is not part of the hyper-educated elite? Is the fragmentation of narration used in Cane that is indicative of a fragmented black identity in America actually working to make Cane less accessible? (Aidan)
• How does the musicality of Rankine’s Citizen challenge the traditional lyric and allow Rankine to advocate for individual action to combat racism? (Acadia)