Topic post example: Citizen

The front cover of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. Cover art by David Hammons (In the Hood, 1993)

Who/what: This image is the front cover of Claudia Rankine's best-selling book of poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, and includes artwork by David Hommans (Rankine). Rankine is a Jamaican-American poet and English Writing professor. Citizen won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry in 2014 (ClaudiaRankine.com). The "object" is the book cover and its popularity since its publication.

Where: Everywhere, at least in the US: the itself book was incredibly popular, was reviewed by most major press outlets, and the cover image later became recognizable as a link between Rankine's work and the #blacklivesmatter movement.

When: Published in 2014. David Hommans originally created the image in 1993 (Rankine, back cover).

Why (is it interesting/relevant): Citizen and its cover image raise the question of how art (specifically "lyric" art, including poetry) relates to protest. 

The identities it's interested in articulating through protest are: "American" (as in "American Lyric") and black youth culture, represented here by the image of the hood or the hoodie. The hoodie has been a symbol for that culture for a long time--since at least 1993--but also came to be a symbol of violent racist attacks on members of that culture after the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012.

Works Cited:

"Claudia Rankine." Claudia Rankine. Web. 2 September 2015.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014.