Binary Opposition in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric: Structuralist Analysis

This study aims to analyse how binary oppositions are constructed and
interpreted in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric through Roland
Barthes' structuralist approach. This work was chosen because of its hybrid form,
which combines poetry, lyrical prose, and visual elements, as well as its ability to
represent racial experiences through fragments of microaggressions in the daily lives
of black people in the United States. This study uses a descriptive qualitative method
with a literature review technique. The research data consists of fragments of lyrical
text, narrative prose, situational narratives, and two visual elements that explicitly
display racial tensions. The analysis is conducted structurally by examining the
relationships between signs, finding patterns of binary opposition, and interpreting
the ideological meanings produced through these relationships based on Roland
Barthes' semiotic theory.
The results of this study show that Citizen constructs binary oppositions such
as white/black, visibility/invisibility, and center/margin through interacting
linguistic and visual structures. These oppositions not only shape textual meaning
but also reveal racial ideologies that operate systemically and are naturalized in
everyday social practices. Thus, this study confirms that Citizen functions as a
literary text that structurally represents and critiques racial power relations through
a complex network of signs.
Keywords: structuralism, binary opposition, Roland Barthes's semiotics, racism,
Citizen: An American Lyr