“Black Studies: in the Wake” The Black Scholar, Special Issue, The Boundaries of Black Studies
Sharpe details the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue duree of Atlantic chattel slavery with black fungibility, antiblackness, and the gratuitous violence that structures black being, of accounting for the narrative, historical, structural, and other positions black people are forced to occupy. Living in the wake as people of African descent means living what Saidiya Hartman identifies as the both the “time of slavery” and the “afterlife of slavery” in which “black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery–skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.
Christina Sharpe is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.
Other publications from this author include:
- Ordinary Notes (2022)
- “The Crook of Her Arm” (2017)
- “Love Is the Message” in Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016)
- In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
- “Three Scenes” in On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Anti-Blackness (2015)
- “The Lie at the Center of Everything” in Black Studies Papers (2014)
- “Response to Jared Sexton’s “Ante-Anti-Blackness: Afterthoughts” for Lateral (inaugural issue of online, peer reviewed E-journal of the Cultural Studies Association) (2012)
- Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010)
- “Gayl Jones’ ‘Days that were Pages of Hysteria.'” in Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, 159-176 (2005)
- “Learning to Live Without Black Familia: Cherríe Moraga’s Nationalist Articulations” in Tortilleras: Hispanic and Latina Lesbian Expression, 240-257 (2003)
- “The Costs of Re-membering: What’s at Stake in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora” in African American Performance and Theatre History: A Critical Reader, 306-327 (2000)