Claudia Rankine, "Meanwhile: A Work in Process" Lecture 3 of 3

The 2022 Berlin Family Lectures with Poet Claudia Rankine
"Meanwhile"
Lecture three: "Meanwhile: A Work in Process"
April 14, 2022
Through the Berlin Family Lectures focused on the concept of "Meanwhile," renowned poet and playwright Claudia Rankine extends historian Tina Campt’s theory of “felt sound,” which she defines as “sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration,” into the realm of “felt time.” Rankine describes "Meanwhile" as the concurrent experience inside the everyday. This concept refuses amnesia given it is the existence that lives alongside and within the simultaneity of lived existence.
Conceptually, Rankine asks during this lectures:
• What are the consequences of being made to experience time as both distinct and simultaneous?
• How can one minute, five minutes, or a symbolic eight minutes and forty-six seconds, affect a lifetime?
• How are the moments that are “a risk to life” for a victim concurrently transformed into a “risk to living,” for the witness (to use Harvard scholar Homi K. Bhabha’s risk terminology)?