Poets and Critics Symposium: Claudia Rankine
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1The 28th Poets and Critics Symposium was organized by Vincent Broqua (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis), Olivier Brossard (Université Gustave Eiffel), Biswamit Dwibedy (American University of Paris) and Abigail Lang (Université Paris Cité). It was held at Université Paris Cité from September 24 to 25, 2025 and centered on the presence and work of American poet, essayist and professor Claudia Rankine. The symposium sessions were complemented by a poetry reading on the evening of September 24 at Atelier Michael Woolworth, featuring Claudia Rankine, Mia You and Gabriel Gauthier. The event was attended by a range of writers, academics, publishers, students and other interested parties based in the United States and Europe.
2A signature feature of the Poets and Critics Symposium is its unconventional format. Departing from the typical speaker/panel structure of academic events, the sessions took place in the form of a fireside chat or round-table discussion, encouraging an almost conversational atmosphere. Rankine elaborated on a host of topics, from the themes of race and politics in her work, to poetry and craft, to archival work and pedagogy, to intellectual and professional conflict.
3The two-day program offered an opportunity to engage broadly with Rankine’s work and lived experience. Throughout the discussion, attendees gained a sense of the processes that undergird Rankine’s lyric work which is deeply imbricated with multidisciplinary research, archival practices and community experience. Through this weaving of past and present record, Rankine makes use of a wealth of shared references to convey her themes, drawing indiscriminately upon sources familiar to her—things she “knows” and “owns”—and discovery (Rankine). Speaking to the use of images in her texts, Rankine shed light on the relationship between her words and “cultural recognition,” a collective process wherein powerful images “live in our imagination and push the text” to new levels of resonance (Rankine). In Rankine’s oeuvre, interactions between text, visuals, and sound across stage, screen, and page construct layers of meaning that prod our social imaginaries.
4Collective experience also informs Rankine’s work in a more active and collaborative sense. Rankine shared about how some of her poetry incorporated anecdotes of different people’s experiences with racism. Likewise, she outlined the essentially collective nature of other projects such as the 2025 For Real For Real exhibit in Berlin, curated by herself, John Lucas, Russell Salmon and Mathias Zeiske, which featured specially-crafted books—shared “lives” and recollections—from artists around the world. The plurality of experience has its fingerprint on Rankine’s work, complicating personae, subject and audience, which is modeled in the pronoun shifts apparent across her books, as one attendee, Dr. Mia You, highlighted.
- 1 Christina Sharpe records an audience’s disturbed reaction to Rankine’s film Situation 8 in her book (...)
5Alongside explorations of her lyric poetry and curatorial work, Rankine offered insights into other facets of her career. She was candid about the conflicts embedded in working in academia (at times a hostile environment), navigating the publishing industry, and transmitting ideas to the public. An emergent reflection: Rankine’s negotiations with her own capacity for harm through the intensity of her subject matter, contending with a responsibility to her audience after being criticized for the traumatic potential of some of her pieces.1 A revelation: Rankine’s framing of her work as an anthologist as a pragmatic response to the myopia and discrimination of racist, white, chauvinistic hegemony in academia and beyond—a testament to the need for Black women to carve out their own space in the archives, a case for building the canon you want to see and teach. These insights, among others, suggest Rankine’s highly practical (as opposed to ambition-driven) and sensitive approach to her projects, a conscious play against the friction she witnesses and experiences as a Black woman writer writing about race and society.
6In keeping with the posture of social and political commentary upheld in Rankine’s work, the symposium discussion at times turned to addressing current global events, such as the apparent rise of far-right political sentiment and authoritarianism around the world, and the most recent intensification of Palestinian genocide. The discussion tested the range of the often Euro-Americancentric insights offered by symposium attendees, Rankine, and Rankine’s work, which is often explicitly framed as an American discourse. Ultimately, however, the issues on the table might have benefitted from the inclusion of more global perspectives.
7Overall, the 28th Poets and Critics symposium was a thought-turning and well-executed event which facilitated in-depth engagement with the broad scope of Claudia Rankine’s work. The sessions were made all the more enriching by the contributions of the attendees whose range of backgrounds and interests stimulated different ways to contemplate Rankine’s outlook on craft, theme, and the practicalities of being a creator-critic in society. A sure takeaway from this two-day experience was Rankine’s passion for poetry and the word, and an appreciation for her multidisciplinary approach to shaping the critical, literary and pedagogical landscapes she’d like to expand and work within.
Notes
1 Christina Sharpe records an audience’s disturbed reaction to Rankine’s film Situation 8 in her book Ordinary Notes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).
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Kodi-Anne Brown, « Poets and Critics Symposium: Claudia Rankine », Transatlantica [En ligne], 2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 01 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/26450 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15i1y
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