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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.
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)
- “Three Scenes” in On Marronage: Ethical Confrontations with Anti-Blackness (2015)
- “Black Studies: in the Wake” The Black Scholar, Special Issue, The Boundaries of Black Studies (2014)
- “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)