Racial politics of the lyric event: the second-person address in Whitman, Rankine, and Sharif

This paper follows Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric and his conception of the “lyric event” to analyze how Walt Whitman, Claudia Rankine, and Solmaz Sharif use the second-person address to implicate the addressee in the marginalization of the racial other. The paper argues that these three poets use the second-person address as an apostrophic invocation of the body politic to enact recognition for a racial other as a lyric event. As a starting point, the paper examines the discrepancy between Whitman’s radically egalitarian poetics and his white supremacist prose writing later in life. The paper concludes that Whitman’s failings are grounded in his epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and his universalizing poetics. The paper follows Whitman’s problematic universalizing by discussing Claudia Rankine’s and Beth Loffreda’s introduction to The Racial Imaginary. The paper argues further that the tradition of second-person address in the American lyric has shifted from an epistemology grounded in the Idealism of Transcendentalism in Whitman, to an epistemology grounded in the material reality of the body with Rankine and Sharif, and that this epistemology of the body is best suited to implicating the second-person addressee through Rankine’s poetics of recognition and Sharif’s poetics of proximity.