Review: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (original) (raw)
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In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
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
The Aftereffects of Slavery: A Black Feminist Genealogy
Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism, 2018
The relationship of the enslaved past to the present has been an ongoing topic within African Diaspora studies generally, and within Black feminist studies specifically. This essay traces a black feminist genealogy rooted in Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007) and her essay "Venus in Two Acts" (2008). These are arguably two of the most influential works of scholarship in African American feminist studies of the past decade. Hartman’s attempt to use the archive to rescue those lost within, particularly girls and women, is a project also taken up in the three texts discussed here: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), Michelle D. Commander’s Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic (2017), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). One of Hartman’s most important contributions is in juxtaposing the absences of the enslaved in the archive with the very real and present repercussions of what she calls the “after effects” of slavery on contemporary Black people, such as being subject to state violence. Hartman's extraordinary work carries its own after effects in its influence on the writing of contemporary scholars of the Black diaspora. Campt, Commander, and Sharpe amplify her claim of the importance of the enslaved past to understanding contemporary Black lives.
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 2022
“…we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.” – Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016) In this paper, I introduce Christina Sharpe’s conceptualizations of wake and wake work, as they pertain to archiving the experiences of Blackness to better understand how the archive and archives are vital for those living and working in the wake of slavery. I am particularly interested in the wake work conducted both in literary works (speculative fiction) and at information sites (community archives). To that end, I closely examine archives as they are presented in literature so as to explicate how these archival narratives created by Black authors perform wake work. Moreover, I make the connection between literary wake work, that which is performed by Black speculative fiction writers, and information wake work, that which is performed by Black community archivists, before delving into an analysis of the physical act of creating archives as the wake work of Black archivists. This investigation of wake work and archive(s) is meant to articulate Black life through a multidisciplinary lens, one that merges scholarship in Black studies, archives, information, and literature. My interrogation of archiving Blackness centers on the concepts of “wake” and “wake work,” and how they can be used to characterize the act of archiving the histories and the futures of Black people as an intervention towards coloring and diversifying the archival record.
The Text, 2024
Racism made its foray into America as early as the 16th century, and it is still found in the texture of American culture and society. It still continues to assume multifarious forms of racial animosity and racial inequality in the 21st century. Enduring centuries of slavery, physical exploitation, and social disparity, Afro-Americans have long been vulnerable to physical violence in the racially-charged America. The historical novel A Mercy (2008) by noted Afro-American writer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019) revolves around the historical milieu and events of 17th century America. In the early phase of colonialism in America, Afro-Americans were victims of various types of human bondage, from chattel slavery to indentured servitude. The present paper aims to depict, from the point of view of Black Feminism, how the female slaves in this novel are exploited—sexually, economically, and politically. It also tries to focus on how they try to warn the younger slaves about slavery by sharing their personal trauma. Motherhood is widely believed to be an essential issue of feminism. This paper attempts to show the psychology of ‘mothering’ in a world circumscribed by racial oppression, and the strategies a black slave-mother adopts for her survival and also to safeguard her children. It investigates why Florens, the protagonist of the novel, ultimately feels the urge to document her excruciating life-story by etching on the wooden walls in one of her master’s rooms. (Keywords: racism; chattel; indentured; trauma; Black Feminism; mothering)
The Handbook of Transatlantic North American Studies, edited by Julia Straub, 2016
This chapter outlines the arguments of Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) and its critics before considering the use of the term 'black Atlantic' to describe a wide range of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, especially in literary studies. In order to illustrate a possible 'black Atlantic' approach to North American literature, a reading of a chapter of Melville's Moby-Dick in conjunction with Frederick Douglass's novella The Heroic Slave, is offered as a case study.
African Boat Narratives, Disposable Bodies, and the New Native Survivor
The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery, 2022
This chapter reconsiders chattel slavery’s legacy in contemporary stories of migration, highlighting the inadequacies of reading these works through memories of the Middle passage alone, while analyzing the insidious new forms of enslavement that African boat narratives expose. When read through the prescient work of Frantz Fanon, these stories present us with nothing less than revolutionaries of the crossing; those whose resounding “yes to life,” in the words of Frantz Fanon, is a deafening rejection of European anti-blackness, challenging border logic and the political machinations of inhospitality for a world in crisis. Migration, especially in today’s climate crisis, is above all else a human impulse that challenges the logic of inequality that slavery and colonialism have cast upon black lives, offering up movement as the dynamic imperative of life today.
The Pursuit of Being: Reflections on Blackness
Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies, 2020
The Black Register calls for the uprooting of a world structured by the systems of oppression imposed by whiteness throughout the centuries. Colonialism, imperialism, and racism have long been weaponized against black-skinned peoples, denying them life and voice. In this book review, the author analyzes Tendayi Sithole’s propositions to establish a new world system where blackness will not be lifeless or voiceless anymore.