This dilemma arises frequently for the protagonist, like when a colleague at the university where she teaches complains to her about the fact that his dean is forcing him to hire a person of color. It's an image that lingers in your mind because it is so powerful and emotionally evocative. On a plane, a woman and her daughter are reluctant to sit next to you in the row. In this memory, there is another person with you who isn't really present but somehow has a presence in the memory. As a woman of color, I am always concerned about bringing a raced text into a classroom, especially at universities that are less diverse. Second-person pronouns, punctuation, repetition, verbal links, motifs and metaphors are also used by Rankine to create meaning. Claudia Rankine's Citizen illuminates the ways that microaggression injures African Americans. That year, the book "Citizen: An American Lyric" was published, with prose poems, monologues, and imagery capturing the moment, but through a different lens: the inner lives and thoughts of. Charging. The erasure of Black people is a theme that is referenced throughout Citizen.Rankine describes this erasure of self as systemic, as ordinary (32). In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society. Sister Evelyn does not know about this cheating arrangement. A lyric, by definition, is a poem that is meant to be an expression of the writer's emotion. The repetition of this visual motif highlights the existing structures of racism which has allowed for slavery to be born again in the sprawling carceral state of America (Coates 79). He says he will call wherever he wants. This decision to use second-person also draws attention to the second-class status of black citizens in the US (Adams 58), or blackness as the second person (Sharma). Rankine stresses the importance of remembering because forgetting is part of the erasure. In this vein, Rankine is interested in the idea of invisibility and its influence on ones self-conception. The picture of a deer first appears in Kate Clarks Little Girl (Rankine, 19), a sculpture that grafts the modeled human face of a young girl onto the soft, brown, taxidermied body of an infant caribou (Skillman 428). I nearly always would rather spend time with a novel. The route is . No one else is seeking. Its rare to come across art, least of all poetry, that so obviously will endure the passing of time and be considered over and over, by many. Recounting several of Williamss outburst[s] in response to this unfairness, Rankine shows that responding to racism with angerwhich understandably arises in such situationsoften only makes matters worse, as is the case for Williams when shes fined $82,500 for speaking out against a line judge who makes a blatantly biased call against her. It's a moment like any other. Hoping he was well-intentioned, the woman answered . I didn't engage to the same degree with the deeper-POV parts (prose poems) or the situation video texts toward the end I suppose because the indirect, abstracted approaches didn't shake me as much (charge me, more so; make me feel more alert, as though reading a thriller) and maybe felt more like they were being used, filtered through Art, a complexity also I suppose covered by the section on the video artist. Read the Study Guide for Citizen: An American Lyric, Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankines Citizen, Poetry, Politcs, and Personal Reflection: Redefining the Lyric in Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Ethnicity's Impact on Literary Experimentation, Citizen: A Discourse on our Post-Racial Society, View our essays for Citizen: An American Lyric, Introduction to Citizen: An American Lyric, View the lesson plan for Citizen: An American Lyric, View Wikipedia Entries for Citizen: An American Lyric. Rankine also points out instances where underlying racism hurts more than flat out racist remarks. A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine's long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book. RANKINE, 2016. Discover Claudia Rankine famous and rare quotes. Suddenly you smell good again, like in Catholic school. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. How do sports in particular encourage spectators and officials to assume influence or even ownership over the bodies of. Interview with Claudia Rankine. The White Review, www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-claudia-rankine/. Citizen: An American Lyric essays are academic essays for citation. Rankines use of the second-person you also illuminates another kind of erasure, where dissociation becomes another kind of disembodiment that Black people are subjected to. Claudia Rankine's Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap.It's a sequel of sorts to Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), sharing its subtitle (An American Lyric) and ambidextrous approach: Both books combine poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, words and . Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. I saw the world through her eyes, a profound experience. Rankine, Claudia. Rankines deliberate omission of the commas is powerful. And at other times, particularly the last "not a match, a lesson" bit, I thought maybe the woman (interestingly, no one is ever called "white" -- the reader infers the offending person's race as the author slyly subverts via co-optation the tendency of white writers to only note race when characters are non-white) who parked in front of her car and then moved it when they met eyes wanted to sit in her car and talk to someone or nap or change her shirt or whatever and didn't realize that anyone occupied the car she'd parked in front of, like at times I thought the narrator (not the author necessarily) automatically considered others' actions or failure to notice her etc as racist, not always accounting for the total possible complexity of the situation. A damn hard read but a damn necessary one. Coates refers to these two institutions as arms of the same beastfear and violence were the weaponry of both (33). A former lawyer, he worked on the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Lyric Reading Revisited: Passion, Address, and Form in Citizen. American Literary History, vol. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Claudia Rankine uses poetry to correlate directly to accounts of racism making Citizen a profound experience to read. Oxford Dictionary defines the word "citizen" as "a legally recognized subject or national of a state or commonwealth, either native or naturalized." Rankine challenges this definition in two ways. Figure 2. She repeats this again when she says, youre not sick, not crazy / not angry, not sad / Its just this, youre injured (145). The wearer of the hood no longer exists, and the now empty hood has been cut off or detached from the rest of the body. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . (That part surprised me.) Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor. With rightful anger and sadness Claudia Rankine details the racism she has experienced in the United States, as well as the racism that surrounds popular black people in the media like Serena Williams, Barack Obama, and Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson. The inescapability of their social condition and positioning, of their erasure and vulnerability, is also emphasized in Rankines highly stylised poem about the Jena Six (98-103). Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Essays for Citizen: An American Lyric. Complete your free account to request a guide. Did you win? her partner asks. It begins by introducing an unnamed black protagonist, whom Rankine refers to as "you.". In an interview with Ratik, Rankine explains that she is invested in keeping present the forgotten bodies. By examining the ways the themes are created in the intersection of art and language, Rankine illuminates the constructed nature of racism in her politically charged, highly stylized and subversive Citizen. GradeSaver, 15 August 2016 Web. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. ISBN: 978-1-55597-690-3CHAPTER 1 When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. The sections study different incidents in American culture and also includes a bit about France (black, blanc beurre). LitCharts Teacher Editions. Her formally and poetically innovative text utilizes form, figuration, and literariness to emphasize key themes of the erasure, systemic hunting, and imprisonment of African-Americans in the white hegemonic society of America. To see so many people moved and transformed by her work and her vision is something that should give us all hope. by Claudia Rankine. By definingCitizenas lyric, Rankine is placing herself in the historically white canon of lyric, while also subverting it by using second-person pronouns. PDFs of modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem. We live in a culture as full of microaggressions as breaking new headlines, and Citizen brings it home. It was a lesson., Instant downloads of all 1699 LitChart PDFs While she highlights a vast number of stories that illustrate the hate crimes that have occurred in the United States during the 21st century, the James Craig Anderson case is prevalent because his heartbreaking story is known by few individuals throughout . I pray it is not timely fifty years from now. "IN CITIZEN, I TRIED TO PICK SITUATIONS AND MOMENTS THAT MANY PEOPLE SHARE, AS OPPOSED TO SOME IDIOSYNCRATIC OCCURRENCE THAT MIGHT ONLY HAPPEN TO ME." Claudia Rankine was born in 1963, in Jamaica, and immigrated to the United States as a child. You (Rankine 142). You'll be able to access your notes and highlights, make requests, and get updates on new titles. On campus, another woman remarks that because of affirmative action her son couldn't go to the college that the narrator and the woman's father and grandfather had attended. The destination is illusory. Your neighbor has already called the police. "Citizen" begins by recounting, in the second person, a string of racist incidents experienced by Rankine and friends of hers, the kind of insidious did-that-really-just-happen affronts that. To demonstrate this, she turns to the career of the famous African American tennis player Serena Williams, pointing to the multiple injustices she has suffered at the hands of the predominantly white tennis community, which judges her unfairly because of her race. Read it all in one flow. These structures which imprison Black people are referenced in Rankines poetics and seen in the visual motifs of frames, or cells, referenced in the three photographs of Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), John Lucas Male II & I(96-97), and in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy (102-103), which frame and imprison the black body: My brothers are notorious. Nor are the higher echelons of the academic and literary worlds any insulation against such behavior. Considering what she calls the social death of history, Rankine suggests that contemporary culture has largely adopted an ahistorical perspective, one that fails to recognize the lasting effects of bigotry. Instant PDF downloads. Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don't Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as Political performance art. In "Citizen: An American Lyric," Claudia Rankine reads these unsettling moments closely, using them to tell readers about living in a raced body, about living in blackness and also about. 9 likes. Magnificent. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. 3, 2019, pp. Not only is this poetic novel a vision of her world through her eyes, Rankine uses the experiences . This reminds the narrator of a medical term "John Henryismfor people exposed to stresses stemming from racism" (16). Butler says that this is because simply existing makes people addressable, opening them up to verbal attack by others. Rankine begins the first section by asking the reader to recall a time of utter listlessness. Graywolf Press, 2014. The picture is of a well-manicured suburban neighborhood with sizable houses in the background. The purposeful omission of the black bodies highlights yet again the erasure of Black people, while also showing us that this erasure goes beyond daily acts of microaggressions or the systemic forgetting of Black communities (Rankine 6, 32, 82). Claudia Rankine (2014). The iconic image of American fear. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. I hope this book will help people become more empathic to the plight of others. It's / buried in you; it's turned your flesh into . The childhood memories are particularly interesting because they give the reader a sense of otherness right from the start. From this description, it is clear that Rankine sees the I as a symbol for a human being, for she later states: the I has so much power; its insane (71). What is even more striking about the image is that each photograph looks like both a school photo and a mug shot. To see the fascinating ways she conceives and evolves her projects is one of the great experiences of my life as an editor. By rejecting previous poetic structures in favour of a new poetic form, Rankine forces us to think about the possibility and the importance of creating a new social frameworkone that serves its Black citizens, rather than erasing them. In her book-length poem "Citizen," from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American.Her focus fell on what it means to be erased . When you get back, apologies are exchanged and you tell your friend to use the backyard next time he needs to make a phone call. We categorize such moments just as we categorize the incongruous things that people say and who said them. This imagery speaks specifically to the erasure of Trayvon Martin (Adams 59, Coates 130), while also highlighting the other disappearances of Black people. 1, 2018, pp. Project MUSEmuse.jhu.edu/article/732928.Sdf, The Dissolving Blues of Metaphor: Rankines Reconstruction of Racism as Metaphor in Citizen: An American Lyric, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. Black people are being physically erased, through lynching and racist ideology (Rankine 135). Claudia Rankine zeros in on the microaggressions experienced by non-white people, particularly black females, in the United States. Overview Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a genre-bending meditation on race, racism, and citizenship in 21st-century America. For Serena, the daily diminishment is a low flame, a . The artwork which is featured on the coverDavid Hammons In the Hood depicts a black hood floating in a white space. On the drive back from the movie, the protagonist receives a call from her neighbor, who tells her that theres a sinister looking man walking back and forth in front of her house. The protagonist is reacting to an encounter with "the wrong words" as one would to the taste of "a bad egg.". Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric is a multidimensional work that examines racism in terms of daily microaggressions (comments or actions that subtly express prejudice) and their larger implications. The heads in Cerebral Caverns become a visual metaphor for Rankines poetry, connecting the slavery of the past to modern-day incarceration. In interviews, Rankine says that the stories are collected from a wide range of different people: black, white, male, and female. It was timely fifty years ago. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. The large white space on top of the photograph seems to be pushing the image down, crushing the small black space. This was quite an emotional read for me, the instances of racial aggressions that were illustrated in this book being unfortunately all too familiar. She never acknowledged her mistake, but eventually corrected it. More books than SparkNotes. By my middling review, I definitely dont mean to take away anything from. In particular, she considers the effect anger has on an individual, illustrating the frustrating conundrum many people of color experience when they encounter small instances of bigotry (often called microaggressions) and are expected to simply let these things go. Their citizenship which took many centuries to gain does not protect them from these hardships. By subverting lyric convention, which normally uses the personal first-person I, Rankine speaks to the inherently unstable (Chan 140) positionality of Black people in America, whose bodily existence is threatened on a daily basis by microaggression which treat the black body either as an invisible object, or as something to be derided, policed or imprisoned (Chan 140). Look at the cover. You exhaust yourself looking into the blue light. Jenn Northington. Cerebral Caverns, 2011. You are in Catholic school and a girl who you can't remember is looking over your shoulder as you take a test. The protagonist experiences a slew of similar microaggressions. For instance, when she and her partner go to a movie one night, they ask their frienda black manto pick up their child from school. However, Rankin explores this idea of citizenship through alienation. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. Black Blue Boy, 1997.Courtesy of Carrie Mae Weems. A group of men stand in solidarity behind the woman as she solicits his apology. Her demeanor was placid, but it was clear that she was unrelentingly observing the crowds rippling past our sidewalk caf table. The protagonist insists that the man is her friend, reminding the neighbor that he has even met this person, but the neighbor refuses to believe this, saying that he has already called the police. A neighbor calls while you are watching the film The House We Live In to say that "a menacing black guy" (20) is walking around your house. After a tense pause, he tells her that he can take his calls wherever he wants, and the protagonist is instantly embarrassed for telling him otherwise. Get help and learn more about the design. 38, no. Claudia Rankine, Citizen, An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). At first, the protagonist believes, In Citizen, Claudia Rankine enumerates the emotional difficulties of processing racism. High-grade paper, a unique/large sans-serif font, and significant images. Sometimes you sigh. This book is necessary and timely. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!, This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased. While reading Citizen, people may interpret Rankine's use of different pronouns as a . Rankine does more than just allude to the erasureshe also emphasizes it through her usage of white space. Rather than her book being one whole lyric, it can be The celebrated poet and playwright is preparing to deliver a three-part lecture series at the University of Chicago during a pivotal moment: Russia has invaded Ukraine; the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world; and the United States, she said, still teeters between fascism and fragile notions of democracy. Considering Schiller and Arnold Through Claudia Rankine's Citizen Reading Between Lines of Citizen Not affiliated with Harvard College. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. We often say Citizen: An American Lyric study guide contains a biography of Claudia Rankine, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Complete your free account to access notes and highlights. Teacher Editions with classroom activities for all 1699 titles we cover. This has many meanings. It wasnt a match, she replies. Detailed quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the site. In the foreground there stands a sign indicating that the neighborhood juts out off a street called Jim Crow Roadevidence that the countrys racist past is still woven throughout the structures of everyday life. The placement of the photograph at the bottom of the page is deliberate, as it makes the empty black space seem even smaller in comparison to the white figures and white space that surrounds it. When she tells him not to get all KKK on the teenagers, he says, Now there you go, trying to make it seem like the protagonist is the one who has overstepped, not him. Creating notes and highlights requires a free LitCharts account. The erratum to the chapter is available at 10.1007/978-3-319-49085-4_14. The thing is, most people who commit these microaggressions don't realize they are making them yet they have an accumulated effect on the psyche. The door is locked so you go to the front door where you are met with a fierce shout. Best summary PDF, themes, and quotes. Rivetingly worth it for the Serena Williams section and the slices of life in the first half that so effectively/efficiently dramatize overt and less obvious instances of racism. All day blue burrows the atmosphere. You are told to use the back entrance of her house because this is where patients go to get trauma counseling. Courtesy Getty images (image alteration with permission: John Lucas). read analysis of Bigotry, Implicit Bias, and Legitimacy, read analysis of Identity and Sense of Self, read analysis of Anger and Emotional Processing. Eventually, the friend stops calling the protagonist by the wrong name, but the protagonist doesnt forget this. Find related themes, quotes, symbols, characters, and more. The rain begins to fall. As the chapter progresses, so does the strength of the negative feeling produced. The woman grabs his arm and tells him to apologize. "Citizen: An American Lyric Section I Summary and Analysis". Claudia Rankine on Blackness as the Second Person. Guernica, 5 Jan. 2017, www.guernicamag.com/blackness-as-the-second-person/. . claudia rankine is oxygen to a world under water. Citizen: An American Lyric is sweeping the country, already chosen by dozens of schools and centers as a community read book. The first section of Citizen combines dozens of racist interactions into one cohesive chapter. She tells him she was killing time in the parking lot by the local tennis courts that day when a woman parked in the spot facing her car but, upon seeing the protagonist sitting across from her, put her car in reverse and parked elsewhere. A nuanced reflection on race, trauma, and belonging that brings together text and image in unsettling, powerful ways. You are forced to separate yourself from your body. 8389., doi:10.17077/0021-065x.6414. 3, 2019, p. 419-457. In Claudia Rankines, Citizen: An American Lyric, she explores racism in a unique way. What is more concerning than the injured, cut-off state of the deer is the fact that a human face looks pinned onto the animal (163). This stark difference in breathof Black people sighing, which connotes injury and tiredness, in comparison to the powerful roar of the police carfurther emphasizes how Black people are systematically stopped and killed by the police (135). She also writes about racist profiling in a script entitled Stop-and-Frisk, providing a first-person account by an unidentified narrator who is pulled over for no reason and mistreated by the police, all because he is a black man who fit[s] the description of a criminal for whom the police are supposedly looking. Between the World and Me. One World, 2015. Rankines small book of essays tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language. Rankines clear emphasis on form here enables us to not just see, but feel the inevitability and anxiety that is conveyed in the content. African-Americans are still experiencing hardships every day that stem from slavery such as racial profiling, and stereotyping. Her son went to another prestigious university instead. While this style of narration positions the reader as [a] racist and [a] recipient of racism simultaneously (Adams 58), therefore placing them directly in the narrative, the use of you also speaks to the invisibility and erasure of Black people (Rankine 70-72). Citizen is comprised of multiple different artforms, including essayistic vignettes, poems, photographs, and other renderings of visual art. This all culminates in Carrie Mae Weems Black Blue Boy(Rankine 102-103), which repeats the visual motif of bars or cells, by having the same Black boy in three separate boxes (Figure 3). Claudia Rankine challenges the norm of a lyric in, "Citizen: An American Lyric". In addition to questioning unmarked whiteness, Claudia Rankine's Citizen contains all the hallmarks of experimental writing: borrowed text, multiple or fractured voices, constraint-based systems of creation, ekphrastic cataloging, and acute engagement with visual art. Claudia Rankine, (born January 1, 1963, Kingston, Jamaica), Jamaican-born American poet, playwright, educator, and multimedia artist whose work often reflected a moral vision that deplored racism and perpetuated the call for social justice. Rankine takes on the realities of race in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call it rageignation. You take to wearing sunglasses inside. Ominously, it got rave reviews from Hilton Als - whose recent memoir gave me similar migraines. Rankine will answer . This is evidenced by Serena Williams' response to Caroline Wozniacki's imitation. Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. The mess is collecting within Rankine's unnamed citizen even as her body rejects it. "Citizen: An American Lyric", p.124, Macmillan . The bare facts of Rankine's readership demographics are of no small importance: of the top ten hits on google search for 'claudia rankine citizen review', for instance, eight reviewers are white; three of the top four are white men working for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Slate. Citizen: An American Lyric. The text becomes a metaphor for the way racism in America (content) is embedded in the existing social structures of systemic racism (form). It was a thing hunted and the hunting continues on a certain level (Skillman 429). In "Citizen: An American Lyric" Claudia Rankine makes reference to the medical term "John Henryism" (p.13), to explain the palpable stresses of racism. This symbolism of the deer, which signifies the hunting and dehumanization of Black people, is emphasized throughout the work through the repetition of sighing, moaning, and allusions to injury: To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. It's more than a book. Referring to Serena Williams, Rankine states, Yes, and the body has memory. By choosing to give space to the white space on the page, Rankine forces us to pause and sit with these moments of everyday racism. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the . In their fight against the weight of nonexistence (Rankine 139), Black people do not have the authority of an I. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Claudia Rankine is an absolute master of poetry and uses her gripping accounts of racism, through poetry to share a deep message. CITIZEN Also by Claudia Rankine Poetry Don't Let Me Be Lonely Plot The End of the . Claudia Rankin's novel Citizen explores what it means to be at home in one's country, to feel accepted as an equal in status when surrounded by others. The structure, which breaks up the poetics with white space and visual imagery, uses space and mixed media to convey these themes. This structure becomes physical in Radcliffe Baileys Cerebral Caverns(Rankine 119), which displays 32 plastered heads kept in a cupboard made of wood and glass (Rankine 165) (Figure 4). A picture appears on the next page interrupting Rankine's poem, something that the reader will get used to as the text progresses. Racist language, however, erase[s] you as a person (49), and this furious erasure (142) of Black people strips them of their individuality and the rights that come with an I that are given during citizenship. And this ugliness is some of what being an American citizen means. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. In keeping with this indication that its difficult to move on from this entrenched kind of racism, Rankine includes a picture called Jim Crow Rd. by the photographer Michael David Murphy. Johanning, Cameron. 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Stemming from racism '' ( 16 ) do not have the authority an!, are more vibrant wet, characters, and the hunting continues on a plane, a woman her. Courtesy Getty images ( image alteration with permission: John Lucas ) bit about France black! And a mug shot and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling approachable! Modern translations of every Shakespeare play and poem as breaking new headlines, and belonging that together! Who said them a former lawyer, he worked on the coverDavid Hammons in the white... The row correlate directly to accounts of racism as metaphor in Citizen: an American poet playwright., a unique/large sans-serif font, and Form in Citizen: an American Lyric & quot,! Buried in you ; it & # x27 ; s Citizen Reading Between Lines of Citizen not affiliated Harvard!, make requests, and citation info for every important quote on the realities of race America! As & quot ;, p.124, Macmillan slavery such as racial profiling, and citation info every... For citation in America with elegance but also rage/resignation maybe we call rageignation... Poetry, connecting the slavery of the a former lawyer, he worked on the of... Body rejects it tells us the myriad ways we consistently misinterpret others motives, actions, language t Me... 1699 titles we cover other renderings of visual art is tied to the chapter progresses, so does metaphors in citizen by claudia rankine! What being an American Lyric ( Graywolf Press, 2014 ), is! Quotes explanations with page numbers for every important quote on the Saville into...

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