¹ Smith, Kimberly K., African American Environmental Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 10Google Scholar.

² The (white, male-dominated) exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape was held at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York from October 1974 to February 1976, and curated by William Jenkins. Jenkins invited the American photographers Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel Jr., and the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, to exhibit images of an industrialized American landscape.

³ “In Conversation: Claudia Rankine and Carrie Mae Weems,” New York Public Library, 9 Sept. 2015, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnmK4vagkZs.

⁴ See note 2 above.

⁵ Simmons, Marlon and Dei, George J. Sefa, “Reframing Anti-colonial Theory for the Diasporic Context,” Postcolonial Directions in Education, 1, 1 (2012), 67–99Google Scholar, 69–70.

⁶ Ibid., 72.

⁷ bell hooks, “Diasporic Landscapes of Longing,” in hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: The New Press, 1995), 65–73, 66.

⁸ Ibid., original emphasis.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Landscape photography is key to Weems's entire oeuvre, and many of her early landscape images are unpeopled portrayals of place that bear the visual markers of colonial practice or the African diaspora, such as the 1991–92 Sea Islands series that documents the Gullah communities off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, or the Africa and Slave Coast series (both 1993), which collate images and artefacts of African ancestry, and portray points of slave passage in Ghana and Senegal. My focus in this essay, however, is on her later American landscapes.

¹² The Latin root of “liminality” is limen, meaning “threshold.” In common usage, the term refers to the quality of being between two states, spaces, or temporal zones, or of existing in both at once, but reducible to neither. In anthropology and psychology, “liminality” is described, after Victor Turner, as the disorienting state of being between two methods of structuring selfhood along a rite of passage or psychological development. See the Oxford English Dictionary.

¹³ See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/203423?redirectedFrom=topography#eid.

¹⁴ Ahmed, Sara, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory, 8, 2 (2007), 149–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Ibid., 153.

¹⁶ Ibid., 149.

¹⁷ Ibid., 150.

¹⁸ In “A Woman in Winter,” a video projection element of the 2008 multimedia installation Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment, Weems narrates, “To get to now, to this moment, she needs to look back over the landscape of memory.” See www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4VevU2LpQo.

¹⁹ Delmez, Kathryn E., “Introduction,” in Delmez, , ed., Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (New Haven, CT and London: Frist Centre for Visual Arts in conjunction with Yale University Press, 2010), 1–9Google Scholar, 9.

²⁰ Raymond, Claire, Women Photographers and Feminist Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 151CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 7Google Scholar. For an extended reading of revisitation and memory in Weems's work see Rumi Hara, “Memory and Landscape in the Sea Islands series by Carrie Mae Weems,” Diffractions: Graduate Journal for the Study of Culture, 2 special issue (Un-)Boundedness: On Mobility and Belonging (March 2014), 1–17.

²² Weems in “Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey,” BOMB magazine, 108 (Summer 2009), at http://bombmagazine.org/articles/carrie-mae-weems.

²³ “Historico-racial” is Fanon's term. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 91Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 151.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Developed in part as a response to Laura Mulvey's now infamous 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Weems's 1989–90 Kitchen Table series in part reclaims the black, female gaze from a white, colonial frame, at the same time repositioning the kitchen table as the point from which a world of experience unfolds and recentres. See http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/kitchen-table.html.

²⁷ Ahmed, 153.

²⁸ Ahmed, 156.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ahmed, 154.

³¹ Weems in “Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey.”

³² Ibid.

³³ Rankine, Claudia, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2014), 5Google Scholar.

³⁴ In discussions, Rankine calls the anecdotes of racist micro-aggressions in Citizen “poems.”

³⁵ Meara Sharma, “Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person,” interview for Guernica magazine, 17 Nov. 2014, at www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person.

³⁶ Rankine in Alexandra Schwarz, “On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson”, New Yorker magazine, 22 Aug. 2014, at www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/seen-interview-claudia-rankine-ferguson.

³⁷ Reading with poet Claudia Rankine, Emerson College, 29 April 2015, available at https://youtu.be/DYWbYesN7Hw.

³⁸ In interview, Rankine often uses this word to describe Citizen, including in her interview with Sharma.

³⁹ For extended discussions on Rankine's reconfiguration of the lyric form see Chan, Mary Jean, “Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine's Citizen,” Journal of American Studies, 52, 1 (2018), 137–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Angela Hume, “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine,” Contemporary Literature, 57, 1, Spring 2016, pp. 79–110.

⁴⁰ “Carrie Mae Weems by Dawoud Bey.”

⁴¹ Rankine in Alexandra Schwarz, “On Being Seen: An Interview with Claudia Rankine from Ferguson,” New Yorker magazine, 22 Aug. 2014, at www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/seen-interview-claudia-rankine-ferguson.

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Rankine, Citizen, 5.

⁴⁴ Rankine, Citizen, 5.

⁴⁵ “A Reading with Claudia Rankine,” Georgetown University, 14 April 2016, at https://youtu.be/h7wM16IJIaI.

⁴⁶ “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant”, BOMB magazine, 129 (1 Oct. 2014), at http://bombmagazine.org/articles/claudia-rankine.

⁴⁷ “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant.” Rankine made a similar comment in her talk “How Art Teaches a Poet to See” at Yale University Art Gallery, 20 June 2015: “Here's one road. Here's another road. If you put all these roads together, you have the whole country.” Available at https://youtu.be/2sbPwNN09n8.

⁴⁸ “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant.”

⁴⁹ “Claudia Rankine in Conversation,” 15 Sept. 2009, at https://poets.org/text/claudia-rankine-conversation.

⁵⁰ The Provenance of Beauty ran during September 2009. See http://thefoundrytheatre.org/2009/09/18/the-provenance-of-beauty.

⁵¹ An excerpt from The Provenance of Beauty script, at www.arts.gov/audio/claudia-rankine.

⁵² The tour was filmed by John Lucas. Part of it can be accessed via his Vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/183717034.

⁵³ Rankine, Claudia, Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Minneapolis, MN: Greywolf Press, 2004), 130Google Scholar, italics in original.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Welch, Tana Jean, “Don't Let Me Be Lonely: The Trans-corporeal Ethics of Claudia Rankine's Investigative Poetics,” MELUS: Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States, 40, 1 (Spring 2015), 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 20.

⁵⁶ Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, 131.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 154.

⁵⁸ I am using the terminology of Harney and Moten here: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).

⁵⁹ Weems, in bell hooks, “Talking Art with Carrie Mae Weems,” in hooks, Art on My Mind, 74–93, 76.

⁶⁰ McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ Glissant quoted in ibid., xxii.

⁶² The images were stored in the archives of Harvard University, discovered in 1976. The entire series can be viewed at: http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/from-here.html.

⁶³ Images can be viewed on Weems's official website, http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/from-here.html.

⁶⁴ Claire Raymond has written that the series exemplifies Weems's “anti-colonial approach … anti-racist activism through art.” Raymond, , “The Crucible of Witnessing: Projects of Identity in Carrie Mae Weems's From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, 13, 1 (2015), 26–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 27.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 29.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 35.

⁶⁷ Raymond also points out (ibid.) the racism of much of National Geographic’s twentieth-century photographs.

⁶⁸ Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October, 39 (Winter 1986), 3–64, 10.

⁶⁹ Weems, quoted in Deborah Willis, “Photographing between the Lines: Beauty, Politics, and the Poetic Vision of Carrie Mae Weems,” in Delmez, Carrie Mae Weems, 32–41, 33–35.

⁷⁰ Raymond, “Crucible,” 33. See also Willis, 32–41.

⁷¹ Harvard threatened to sue, then retracted the threat, after Weems used the images without written consent. See Murray, Yxta Maya, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried: Carrie Mae Weems’ Challenge to the Harvard Archive,” 8 Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, 8, 1 (2013), 1–78Google Scholar. Rankine talks about Getty's reluctance to grant rights to the image in many of her interviews and talks.

⁷² Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 157.

⁷³ Weems described her own exhibit thus, quoted in Raymond, “Crucible,” 29.

⁷⁴ Ahmed, 156.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Rankine, Citizen, 53.

⁷⁷ Ahmed, 165.

⁷⁸ hooks, “Diasporic Landscapes of Longing,” 66.

⁷⁹ Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighbourhood watch member George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, 26 February 2012. Martin was unarmed, and was wearing a hoodie, which apparently compounded Zimmerman's appraisal of him as suspicious.

⁸⁰ Rankine, Citizen, 89–90.

⁸¹ Hume, Angela, “Toward an Antiracist Ecopoetics: Waste and Wasting in the Poetry of Claudia Rankine,” Contemporary Literature, 57, 1 (Spring 2016), 79–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 99.

⁸² McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 4.

⁸³ Fanon's name appears four times in Citizen, and Rankine mentions his influence in a number of recorded interviews.

⁸⁴ Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 90, quoted in Ahmed, 152.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 90, original emphasis.

⁸⁶ Ibid., 91, quoted in Ahmed, 152. Fanon is quoting Jean Lhermitte's 1939 L'image de notre corps.

⁸⁷ Ahmed, 153, my emphasis.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 154.

⁸⁹ “Claudia Rankine: An American Lyric,” Chicago Humanities Fair, 31 Oct. 2015, published on YouTube 17 Feb. 2016 at https://youtu.be/cxU3MJmhzl0.

⁹⁰ Rankine, Don't Let Me Be Lonely, 8. See Hume, 86.

⁹¹ Rankine, Citizen, 7, 8.

⁹² For more on this subject see Jones, Shermaine M., “‘I Can't Breathe!’: Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric,” South: A Scholarly Journal, 50, 1 (Fall 2017), 37–45Google Scholar.

⁹³ “In Conversation: Claudia Rankine and Carrie Mae Weems.”

⁹⁴ “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant.”

⁹⁵ Rankine, Citizen, 8.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 17, 28, 32, 151.

⁹⁷ Rankine established a multidisciplinary cultural laboratory run out of Manhattan in 2017, and named it the Racial Imaginary Institute. See https://theracialimaginary.org.

⁹⁸ Rankine's use of Wangechi Mutu's collage work from Sleeping Heads (2006) visually emphasizes the assemblage of the black body from different body parts and often violent, asphyxiating perspectives.

⁹⁹ Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 157–58.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 158.

¹⁰¹ Rankine quotes Barthes's Theory of the Text (1981) and then Barbara Johnson's A World of Difference (1987) in “Claudia Rankine by Lauren Berlant.”

¹⁰² Ibid.

¹⁰³ Rankine often uses the example of a white person's assumption, on the telephone, that Rankine is white, followed by their extreme unease and surprise, on meeting her in person, on discovering she is black.

¹⁰⁴ Cervenak, Sarah Jane, Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.