· 2016
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
- 3,265citations
- 2016year
Short summary
Christina Sharpe introduces the concept of the 'orthography of the wake' to analyze how the afterlives of slavery shape Black existence, revealing both persistent violence and emergent possibilities.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Introduces the 'orthography of the wake' as a method for reading representations of Black life.
- Analyzes metaphors of the 'wake,' 'ship,' and 'hold' to understand the enduring impact of slavery's afterlives.
- Situates anti-Blackness as a 'total climate' that normalizes premature Black death.
- Identifies the 'wake' as a space for artistic production, resistance, and possibility.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and "idian 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
The authors' abstract, as published at the source., 2016 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities