Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including the award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—two works at the center of What Remains, a multimedia performance to be presented at the Walker in March. A collaboration between Rankine, choreographer Will Rawls, and filmmaker John Lucas, the work combines movement, language, and video to examine the “culturally ingrained kinds of surveillance that shape and have shaped the black American experience” (New York Times). She is also the author of two plays including The White Card (which she’ll discuss at an April 10 Walker lecture); numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Citizen holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. She lives in California and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.
1.
RANDOM ACTS OF FLYNESS
Random Acts of Flyness, created by Terence Nance for HBO, marries Afrofuturism to Afro-Pessimism. Nance, whose titles, for example, “Everybody Dies” and “White Thoughts,” are themselves provocative, has constructed episodes from the most contemporary theory and thoughts on whiteness, anti-black racism, and queer and gender studies. The collective gaze and black sociality meet in each intersectional segment.
2.
SIGNS OF EMPIRE
British artist John Akomfrah’s Signs of Empire is the catalogue that accompanied the show at the New Museum. His immersive two- or three-channel video installations force intertextuality into the viewing experience. History, landscape, theory, and biography are in conversation in each installation. If one can’t see these amazing works, consider the catalogue Signs of Empire the next best thing.
3.
HEAVY: AN AMERICAN MEMOIR AND FAIRVIEW
Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir spins painfully out of “the personal is political,” a phrase associated with the black feminist movement and second-wave feminism. Laymon opens a “vein of being” in order to critique, personally, his mother, and, politically, American society. The language is lyrical and rushes forward with the full force of a flooding of both emotion and history. 3b. Fairview, a play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, also is a family drama about American racism and the white gaze that performs its own critique. It’s a meta-experience and unforgettable.
4.
STEVE MCQUEEN’S WIDOWS
I will see anything starring Viola Davis, but Steve McQueen’s Widows with its ensemble cast was amazing. All the women were incredible. Despite being a genre movie, it’s also really a film about love, a film of love stories. And yes, betrayal.
5.
HOW FASCISM WORKS
The philosopher Jason Stanley followed his 2015 How Propaganda Works with How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. As American citizens figure out for themselves how much weight to give to our presidential tweets, Stanley outlines why we should be on guard as citizens and what to look for before we label our government fascist even as fascist practices are clearly in place.
6.
THE HEAT & THE LOAD
William Kentridge’sThe Head & the Load lives between genres: art installation, opera, play, dance and sound piece. Tenderness and rage rise and fall inside a consideration of empire and war. This performance is the abject sublime, to use Arthur Jafa’s term.
7.
LOVE IS THE MESSAGE
Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message brings forward in one heroic sweep slices of African American life. Quotidian images are attached to traumatic moments in the news to larger than life celebrity moments to private church moments to autobiographical moments in Jafa’s life to presidential moments to black magnificence. A real tour de force in which Jafa creates a “platform for beholding.”
8.
DEAR ANGEL OF DEATH
Simone White’s Dear Angel of Death is a collection of poems and prose marked by investigations of loss, motherhood, grief, and art. In the extended essay that gives this volume its title, White excavates the intersections of gender and violence in the prevalent conflation of Blackness with music. Part eulogy, part reckoning, Dear Angel of Death spans the gaps between its constellations of influences: Amiri Baraka and trap music, Afro-Pessimism, and Giorgio Agamben.
9.
ROMA
Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, available now on Netflix, is a stunning portrait of racial capitalism as told by one Indigenous woman’s narrative of being a domestic worker within a middle-class, white Mexican family in the 1970s. Based on the director’s own memories, in collaboration with the real-life persons and actors whose exhausted lives carry the impossible demands of class and race and gender, Roma is an example of reparative cinema at its best.
10.
ATLANTIC IS A SEA OF BONES
Atlantic is a Sea of Bones is a short film, available online for free, directed by Tourmaline Gossett. Tourmaline is a young Black trans director whose hallucinatory cinema lovingly honors not only Black queer elders but also troubles their relationship to institutional art space and official archives.
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