In the wake : on Blackness and being / Christina Sharpe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Social conditions.

African Americans.

Racism--Health aspects--United States.

Racism.

Premature death--Social aspects--United States.

Premature death.

Discrimination in law enforcement--United States.

Discrimination in law enforcement.

Slavery--United States--Psychological aspects.

Slavery.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (188 pages)

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2016.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

The wake

The ship

The hold

The weather.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8223-7345-9

OCLC:

1141663324