Structural Inequality and Hypervisibility from Childhood to Adulthood in Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man and Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric

<p>Hypervisibility is the condition of being excessively watched and scrutinized in a manner that magnifies differences in marginalized individuals and communities, which includes race, disability, sexual orientation, gender, and socioeconomic status. This condition often occurs within unequal power structures where marginalized individuals and communities are subjected to excess observation, judgement, and systemic control where being seen does not equate to being valued or understood. James Baldwin’s <em>Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood </em>(1974) and Claudia Rankine’s <em>Citizen: An American Lyric </em>(2014)<em> </em>represent Black subjectivity as shaped and sustained through such social constructs that emphasize the hypervisibility of the racialized body. Baldwin and Rankine share an epistemological voice insofar as they both write from within the confines of lived racial visibility that demands emotional regulation.</p> <p>Though separated by nearly four decades, the formally experimental nature of these texts allows them to be read together as a continuum of racial formation from childhood to adulthood; Baldwin’s four-year-old TJ in 1974 Harlem would be 44 years old at the time of <em>Citizen</em>’s 2014 publication, and reading these texts together allows them to be conceptualized as a transgenerational dialogue about racial formation and survival under structural inequality. In this paper, I examine how emotional regulation, which is an intentional reaction to experiences of racism and hypervisibility (Chaney, et. al.), becomes a survival strategy which both writers expose in order to represent how Black subjects suffer under conditions of hypervisibility.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters Thesis

Year dc:date.available

2026

Author dc:creator

• Morrison, Helen Brooke

Contributors dc:contributor

• Dr. Monika Gehlawat
• Dr. Christopher Spaide
• Dr. Eric Tribunella

• black studies
• critical race theory
• african american literature
• James Baldwin
• Claudia Rankine
• contemporary literature
• Literature in English, North America

Repository record dc:identifier

https://aquila.usm.edu/masters_theses/1177

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:aquila.usm.edu:masters_theses-2273