Affective Ruptures and Racialized Subjectivity in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric and Tommy Orange's There There

Situated at the intersection of affect theory and critical race studies, this paper examines how contemporary literature mobilizes affect to represent racial violence beyond sociological description. Through comparative analysis of Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) and Tommy Orange's There There (2018), I argue that these texts construct distinct temporal models of racialized affect, accumulative versus intergenerational, reflecting different structural positions within anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Christina Sharpe, and Indigenous studies scholars including Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, this analysis demonstrates how formal strategies, second-person address, visual-textual hybridity, and polyvocal narration, function as affective architectures transmitting embodied experiences of racial harm. The comparative reading reveals both the incommensurability of Black and Indigenous subject positions and their shared recognition that racialized subjectivity emerges through ongoing atmospheric encounters with violence. This paper contributes the concept of affective architectures as an analytical method for understanding how literary form structures emotional experience and renders visible the sensory dimensions of racial trauma.