Loneliness, Grief, and the (Un)Caring State: Collective Ailments in Claudia Rankine’s "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric"

Parra Fernández, Laura de la2024-12-132024-12-132022-12Parra Fernández, Laura De La. «Loneliness, Grief, and the (Un)Caring State: Collective Ailments in Claudia Rankine’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric”». JAm It! : Journal of American Studies in Italy, n.º 7, diciembre de 2022, pp. 14-36, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.13135/2612-5641/6801.2612-564110.13135/2612-5641/6801https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/112615This research is part of the project “Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective” (PID2020-113330GBI00), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (10.13039/501100011033).ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes Claudia Rankine’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric” (2004) from the perspective of “ugly feelings” (Ngai 2005), such as disavowed mourning (Butler 2004) or loneliness, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Following Judith Butler’s contention about the hindered possibility for community in the recognition of US national vulnerability, I will argue that Rankine’s work underscores the disparities in public recognition of grief and private care for Othered subjects’ pain in contemporary American society. In particular, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” displays a series of physical and mental collective ailments in US citizens, such as medicalized depression, as Rankine attempts to bear witness to the institutionalized injustice and erasure of the violence exerted upon America’s precarious bodies. The text enacts a form of recognition, only if temporary, through the fragmented use of the narrative/lyric ‘I,’ performatively demanding action from the reader.engAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Loneliness, Grief, and the (Un)Caring State: Collective Ailments in Claudia Rankine’s "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric"journal articlehttps://ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/article/view/6801https://doi.org/10.13135/2612-5641/6801https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/indexhttps://www.aisna.net/open access821.111(73)Rankine, Claudia7don.07821.111(73)"20"Claudia Rankine9/11NeoliberalismLyric essayAffect theoryFilología inglesaLiteraturaEscritores6202.01 Crítica de Textos6202.02 Análisis Literario5505.10 Filología