Faculty Spotlight: Camille Rankine

Camille Rankine is an assistant professor in the Department of English. As a writer, reader and teacher, Rankine is interested in how things work: both the mechanics and the mechanisms at work within our lives.

Tell me about your creative work.

I'm working on a second collection of poems right now, and a big part of what I'm doing is examining this idea of the zone of non-being, which is a concept that Frantz Fanon wrote about in his book, “Black Skin, White Masks.” Basically, it's the idea that Black people — he was writing about Black men, but it applies to Black people and a lot of marginalized people — have this experience existing in a space where essentially society doesn't recognize your humanity.

I've been thinking about what that state is, what it's like to exist in that state and what that state makes of the people who live within it. What's possible within that state? Can it be a liberating space, once you move away from the traditional definitions of what it means to be a person and participate in a society? What if you can redefine that?

I’ve also been thinking about how that state was made. What were the tools and mechanisms that created that place for people to exist in? So, I've also been doing a lot of work digging into texts that might give a sense of how that state of non-being was built, and how people got pushed into that space. I've been looking at these early 20th century and 19th century texts, especially, that are dealing with different kinds of pseudoscience about identity, like phrenology and physiognomy, and how the container of the body communicates someone's character. I've been reading texts about race and migration and national identity, and I've been writing these poems that I'm calling revisions, that are sometimes erasures, or sometimes just utilizing language from those texts to critique them or reimagine something that is oppositional to the ideology that they're professing.

How is your poetry adding to the greater field?

It’s difficult as a poet to talk about what you are adding to the field, I think, but you'd like to believe that your work is something completely new and different, because it's yours, and it's something that only you could make. But at the same time there's a sense of humility about entering into this larger field, with all these incredible voices that have created in the past and that are creating right now. And you're just a drop in the bucket of that.

There’s a lot of amazing work happening in poetry now that’s examining all kinds of things about what our world is, how it was made, what identity means, and how we fit together. And I am adding my voice into that larger conversation.

How did you become interested in this topic and writing poetry?

I've always been a creative person in different kinds of ways. Music was the first thing that I was serious about, and I loved photography and visual art, but I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid. Then in high school, I had a teacher who encouraged me and I just thought, ‘Oh, this is something that I might actually be interested in doing more of.’

The thing about poetry and writing that I find fascinating is that you're using this medium that we use constantly every day, all the time, and that we take for granted. At the same time, it's this really essential thing, language — it’s an immediate and absolutely necessary point of connection and communication between human beings. It's a really overused, overwrought, overworked material that at the same time we must have, and everything depends on it. And so, I love the idea of taking this overused thing, and making something precious and delicate and exact with it, that causes you to look at language, to experience language in a new way, and to learn something, or feel something, or see something named that you had never really seen named before.

Considering that we're constantly throwing words around, the idea that poetry can put words to a feeling or an idea, something that had never really been given those words, I just think that's kind of magical.

What are you most excited to accomplish as a faculty member at CMU?

I think there are things that I want to accomplish while I'm a faculty member in terms of my own writing. But then also, when I think about my time at CMU and my position as a faculty member, I'm interested in working toward building and expanding a sense of literary community, connecting writers to the larger university, connecting writers to scholarly conversations and conversations about other fields, and also making sure that the students who are taking writing classes, students who are English majors or minors, students who are interested in writing and literature, can see that writing has a place in this larger world — within the university, yes, but also within the world itself.

I think that what I really am excited about doing while I'm here is working with colleagues at CMU in order to build more and more spaces and opportunities for students, especially, to see what's possible in the world of literature, and how writing can build these bridges to other fields of study, to other people, to ideas, and the doors that writing can open up within yourself and within the world.

What are your goals for the next generation of writers?

When I think about the next generation of writers, I think about the world that we're in right now. There are so many challenges in our current political moment: challenges to freedom of speech and expression. There's this push and pull in American society, and right now in the world at large, where populations that have been silenced and erased have pushed and pushed, and then these more powerful cultures push back and try to take back space. 

When I think about that movement, I feel that while writing is not activism — it's not breaking down prison walls — at the same time, it is speech. It is the way that we build and tell stories about who we are as people and who we can be. It's a way that we tell stories about what's happened in the world and what's happening now, and a way that we share ideas about what's possible. So, when I think about the next generation of writers, I hope that they can keep doing that kind of work and carrying that forward into the future, keep imagining things that are possible both on the page and off the page that we haven't yet imagined — that I haven't yet imagined. That’s what I hope for them.

The Faculty Spotlight series features new and junior faculty at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Stay tuned for our next installment to learn more about the dynamic and engaging research and scholarly work being conducted in the college.