Inspired by Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situations series, you will create a Situation Poem that connects to the themes of our course.
Here is how Rankine and Lucas describe the work behind this series:
Situations is a multi-genre response to contemporary life in the twenty-first century. Each video is in dialogue with a natural disaster or a national or international event or policy. Our intent was to interrogate the political and cultural impact of catastrophic events on individual lives through layered responses to moments such as the attack on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina or “stop and frisk” laws. At times, these events were set in motion by a single encounter, as in the World Cup headbutt where Zinedine Zidane felt the assault that language can yield and responded to it. At other times, social media supplied us with the videos of shootings of unarmed people of color that were collaged in order to recreate the effect of an accumulated affront on a life, on lives. As artists and citizens, we were especially interested in how the media informs our understanding through specific racialized framing of these public events. Our national discourse reinforces or interrupts ideas informing the racial imaginary and since many, if not all, of these events engage the language of race and racism, this age-old tension was crucial as we set out to marry language to image. The documentary impulse behind Situations can be seen not only in the appropriated images but also in the appropriated language. Our titles attempt to locate the events in real time and in some works, like Hurricane Katrina, the text, for the most part, is taken from actual statements made in response to the displacement and abandonment of American Citizens. It is our feeling that both devastating images and racist statements need management. In other videos a frame was built for the images through appropriated texts from literary and philosophical sources which exist alongside the poetic lines. This ongoing series was conceived in part as a civic response to an archive of images of contemporary life that carries with them the legacy of the “afterlife of slavery.”
While Rankine and Lucas’ work explicitly looks at disasters, national or international events or policies— your “situation” need not necessarily be so wide in scope. Our purpose, however, remains the same as Rankine and Lucas’:
As artists and citizens, we were especially interested in how the media informs our understanding.
Perhaps you are interested in examining racialized framing, gendered framing, ability-centered framing or another critical lens. The choice is yours. The key, however, is to:
Choose an event that is covered widely in the media, across different platforms
Appropriate language from that coverage
Using that appropriated language, create something new (your Situation Poem)
You’ll submit an accompanying statement (~750-1000 words) with your poem that explains:
Why you chose the situation that you did.
A bibliography of the sources you examined as part of the creation of your Situation Poem (MLA format, not included in your word count)
A reflection on your process— how did you choose the phrases that you did? How did you approach your research?
A reflection on your product— What is the intended purpose of your poem? What are you trying to communicate? To what extent do you believe that you are successful? Why?
This assessment gives you an opportunity to conduct research and perform a rhetorical analysis in a way that is a little bit different than what you might have previously encountered. When you think about Claudia Rankine’s work, the first things that come to mind are not “research paper” or “analysis,” but her work fundamentally centers both of these activities. This creative project asks you to engage with and produce writing that doesn’t fit neatly into any one generic category, which more accurately reflects the way that research, composition, and creation processes function in the world.
See the daily calendar for benchmarks and due dates.