New York Times Asks What Claudia Rankine's Reading

For the New York Times's By the Book series, Claudia Rankine answers questions about what she's reading, what she's teaching, what's on her nightstand, and more. From the interview: 

What’s your favorite book to assign and discuss with your students at Yale?

Harryette Mullen’s “Sleeping With the Dictionary” performs how a formally innovative text stays current with the culture despite its publication date. She works with what she calls “ready-mades from the mass-culture dumpster” as one aspect of her compositional strategy. This means the reader encounters, in an improvisatory manner, folk sermons, raps, puns, riddles, political slogans, advertisements, headlines, etc. The work refuses to identify with a single, person, place or thing as it engages race in America. “Muse and Drudge” is another of her books I often teach.

What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

“Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval,” by Saidiya Hartman, created new pathways for me to think about archival work — what’s left unsaid, what’s documented, what goes undocumented in the making of a life. Hartman, one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers, introduced the term “critical fabulation” into my world. She’s a theorist and writer who actually changes what’s possible in my thought patterns. It’s exciting.

Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?

I wish writers would consider more deeply how whiteness is constructed in their work. The unmarked ways in which our white supremacist orientations get replicated in books and go unquestioned in theory remain one of the most insidious ways racist ideas continue to shape our consciousness.

Continue reading at the New York Times.