Ordinary notes / Christina Sharpe.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African Americans--Social conditions.

African Americans.

United States--Race relations--History.

United States.

Racism against Black people--United States.

Racism against Black people.

Racism--United States.

Racism.

Genre:

Anecdotes.

Physical Description:

379 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Summary:

Told through a series of 248 notes, this volume explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake of it, touching upon such themes as language, beauty, memory, history and literature.

"A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past--public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal--with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages--sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature--always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "I learned to see in my mother's house," writes Sharpe. "I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method," collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a "Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness," and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces." -- Provided by publisher.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 367-375).

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Beardwood Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9780374604486

0374604487

OCLC:

1376023460