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Books by christina sharpe

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, a... more In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Endorsements

"Christina Sharpe brings everything she has to bear on her consideration of the violation and commodification of Black life and the aesthetic responses to this ongoing state of emergency. Through her curatorial practice, Sharpe marshals the collective intellectual heft and aesthetic inheritance of the African diaspora to show us the world as it appears from her distinctive line of sight. A searing and brilliant work."
— Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

"Christina Sharpe's deep engagement with the archive of Black knowledge production across theory, fiction, poetry, and other intellectual endeavors offers an avalanche of new insights on how to think about anti-Blackness as a significant and important structuring element of the modern scene. Cutting across theoretical genres, In the Wake will generate important intellectual debates and maybe even movements in Black studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, and beyond. This is where cultural studies should have gone a long time ago."
— Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation hav... more Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Papers by christina sharpe

Interview conducted by Selamawit Terrefe in Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the disco... more Interview conducted by Selamawit Terrefe in Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism,
blackness and the discourses of Modernity

Editor, Dalton Anthony Jones
Assistant Editors, M. Shadee Malaklou and Sara-Maria Sorentino

In "The Lie at the Center of Everything," Christina Sharpe reads Valerie Martin's 2003 Orange Pri... more In "The Lie at the Center of Everything," Christina Sharpe reads Valerie Martin's 2003 Orange Prize winning novel Property for the ways that it positions readers, across race, to enter into the narrative through the consciousness of the white slave-owning woman Manon Gaudet. Sharpe traces the ways that such positioning locates many readers in the inability to see (or hear) black suffering, locates them as unable to see or account for the matter of race; specifically the 'lived experience of the black.'

Book Reviews by christina sharpe

Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is the latest installment in a soci... more Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is the latest installment in a sociological tradition that subjects black life to scholarly scrutiny. An “urban” ethnography of a mixed-income, black neighborhood in West Philadelphia in the early 2000s that Goffman calls 6th Street, On the Run is “an account of the prison boom and its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them.” To produce this “on-the-ground account” of a “community on the run,” Goffman took on the role of participant observer.

Talks by christina sharpe

Book Chapter by christina sharpe

In ON MARRONAGE: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness, Edited by P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon... more In ON MARRONAGE: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness, Edited by P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, a... more In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake." Activating multiple registers of "wake"—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Endorsements

"Christina Sharpe brings everything she has to bear on her consideration of the violation and commodification of Black life and the aesthetic responses to this ongoing state of emergency. Through her curatorial practice, Sharpe marshals the collective intellectual heft and aesthetic inheritance of the African diaspora to show us the world as it appears from her distinctive line of sight. A searing and brilliant work."
— Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

"Christina Sharpe's deep engagement with the archive of Black knowledge production across theory, fiction, poetry, and other intellectual endeavors offers an avalanche of new insights on how to think about anti-Blackness as a significant and important structuring element of the modern scene. Cutting across theoretical genres, In the Wake will generate important intellectual debates and maybe even movements in Black studies, cultural studies, feminist studies, and beyond. This is where cultural studies should have gone a long time ago."
— Rinaldo Walcott, author of Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation hav... more Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Interview conducted by Selamawit Terrefe in Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, blackness and the disco... more Interview conducted by Selamawit Terrefe in Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism,
blackness and the discourses of Modernity

Editor, Dalton Anthony Jones
Assistant Editors, M. Shadee Malaklou and Sara-Maria Sorentino

In "The Lie at the Center of Everything," Christina Sharpe reads Valerie Martin's 2003 Orange Pri... more In "The Lie at the Center of Everything," Christina Sharpe reads Valerie Martin's 2003 Orange Prize winning novel Property for the ways that it positions readers, across race, to enter into the narrative through the consciousness of the white slave-owning woman Manon Gaudet. Sharpe traces the ways that such positioning locates many readers in the inability to see (or hear) black suffering, locates them as unable to see or account for the matter of race; specifically the 'lived experience of the black.'

Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is the latest installment in a soci... more Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is the latest installment in a sociological tradition that subjects black life to scholarly scrutiny. An “urban” ethnography of a mixed-income, black neighborhood in West Philadelphia in the early 2000s that Goffman calls 6th Street, On the Run is “an account of the prison boom and its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them.” To produce this “on-the-ground account” of a “community on the run,” Goffman took on the role of participant observer.

In ON MARRONAGE: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness, Edited by P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon... more In ON MARRONAGE: Ethical Confrontations with Antiblackness, Edited by P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods