John W. Kluge Lecture

The Racialized Space of the Conversation

While writing her recent play, The White Card, and imagining people onstage in dialogue, poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine began to think about the conversations and interactions she’d had in her recent daily life as possible points of entry into ideas surrounding race. In this lecture, Rankine will discuss her process surrounding the writing of The White Card and the recent New York Times essay, “Brief Conversations with White Men,” focusing on the poetics of conversation as a literary art form.