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.

• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study