In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

by Christina Sharpe

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Theory, Philosophy, History, Feminism, Politics

175 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2016

About the author

Christina Sharpe is Professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke 2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke 2016) and Ordinary Notes (Knopf/FSG/Daunt 2023).

Reviews

[Nina]

Black life in the wake is black life in the afterlife of slavery. Emancipation was not a reversal of experience of black life in America. Instead the violence of slavery was transformed into violence of different policies (whether legal or widely accepted).In this climate of anti-blackness, it is understood that black death is "immanent and imminent."

However the ways that we care for each other ("attending to black death but also to the largeness of black life") is something Christina Sharpe names "wake work." As an English professor, Sharpe shows us this wake work by examining the art of Dionne Brand, Julie Dash, Arthur Jafa, and more. Artists who, according to Sharpe, are not interested in resolving the question of exclusion through popular means (civil rights, inclusion, etc.). These examinations help expand what is possible not only in the work of black artists but in the life of black people, I think. (It definitely challenged me as an artist)

If we understand violence as a real and consistent force against black life, then as Sharpe asserts "we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force."

Recommended reading, especially for those interested in the work of Saidiya Hartman, Arthur Jafa, Frank Wilderson, and Dionne Brand. I've read and appreciated many of them prior to In The Wake and now have some additional ways to think about their work and art and life in general.

[Hollis]

This is an incredible attempt at literary-social criticism as creative-critical fabulation (because this is an upfront extension of Hartman's "Venus in Two Acts" essay). Sharpe's ranged archive - the use of slave daguerreotypes against migrant photography, Zong and Beloved interpreted alongside period-rooted court documents and journals, excerpts from contemporary journalism and media - is fascinating, engaging, enlightening, traveling across time and space. Especially important for the text's strength is its pace, the powerfully autobiographic introduction serving as a launching pad to Sharpe's diagnosing what it means to be in the wake. It's a relatively slim text, but not only does she describe what a climate of antiblackness means and argue its existence, she also provides a direction for how to resist that climate. I won't get into what that means, because the text itself effectively functions as an example of a new rhetoric, something to resist the reproduction of the "silences of the archives," the "violence of abstraction." This book is well worth the read, not just for its scholarly insights and ideas, but for the quality of its language and prose, this book motivates a new direction for how to write, how to see, how to be! It’s obviously one of my favorite books.

[Harris]

One of those books that, upon reading it, you regret that you hadn’t read it years ago.

[Theodore · Rating 5 out of 5]

in re-reading this for a second time, in the footnotes, this book makes this world far less blurry. just spectular work.
---
“...how does one mourn the interminable event?”

a text that begs to be re-read. but I found this to be in such conversation with the literature and scholarship I've read this year. Sharpe theory is clear and concise - I'm left thinking deeply about the ways these stages have manifested in my own life.

[Danielle Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

hard to describe how i feel.
sharpe's work lives at the intersection of history, linguistics, and art. some of the connections she makes are uncanny, and poetic, and devastating, all at once. it is an astute, compact book, but i found it hard to read more than a little at a time, it was rather heavy. she tries to give some glimmer of hope at the end, but that hope is hard to grasp. she argues: when black beings cannot breathe, the solution is aspiration, as in, to breathe. (how?) by re-imagining our image of blackness, through annotation and redaction. (but is that enough?)

i do highly recommend reading this work, if you are up for it.

--

"In other words, even as we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or only only live in subjection and as the subjected. Though she was not part of any organized Black movements, except in how one's life and mind are organized by and positioned to apprehend the world through the optics of the door and antiblackness, my mother was politically and socially astute. She was attuned not only to our individual circumstances but also to those circumstances as they were an indication of, and related to, the larger antiblack world that structured all of our lives. Wake; the state of wakefulness; consciousness."

"We learned from the doctors that the dormancy period for mesotheliomas is long, from ten to fifty years. If this mesothelioma was from what and from where we thought, we were struck that the damage from one summer's work forty-five years earlier at a local insulation company in Wayne, Pennsylvania, when he was fourteen years old could suddenly appear, now, to fracture the present. In the wake, the past that is not the past reappears, always, to rupture the present."

"What does it mean to return? Is return possible? Is it desired? And if it is, under what conditions and for whom? The haunt of the ship envelops and persists in the contemporary. ... And while...Hollande acknowledged France's "debt" to Africa because of slavery and the "baneful role played by France," he added that this history "cannot be the subject of a transaction." Unless, of course, that transaction benefits France (like the indemnity Haiti was forced to pay) through trade and other contracts and "investments." But what is moral debt? How is it paid? Is it that Black people can only be the objects of transaction and not the beneficiaries of one, historical or not? The arc of return for Haiti is closer to a full circle or, perhaps, that Ellisonian boomerang of history, with Hollande making the first official state visit by a French president to Haiti since its successful revolution, and with Hollande and France as the beneficiaries of that visit and not those nations immiserated by ongoing legal theft."

"On a popular French TV program, Senegalese writer Fatou Diome said,

'These people whose bodies are washing up on these shores,—and I carefuly choose my words—if they were Whites, the whole Earth should be shaking now. Instead, it's black and Arabs who are dying and their lives are cheaper. The European Union, with its navy and war fleet, can rescue the migrants in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea if they want to, but they sit and wait till the migrants die. It's as if letting them drown is used as a deterrent to prevent migrants from coming to Europe. But let me tell you something: that doesn't deter anyone...because the individual who is migrating as a survival instinct, who believes that the life they are living isn't worth much, he's not afraid of death.'

The Zong! repeats; it repeats and repeats through the logics and the calculus of dehumaning started long ago and still operative. The details and the deaths accumulate; the ditto ditto fills the archives of a past that is not yet past. The holds multiply. And so does resistance to them, the survivance of them: "the brittle gnawed life we live,/I am held, and held.""

"Let us return to Aerile Jackson, the black woman who is made simultaneously to appear and disappear in Sekula and Burch's The Forgotten Space—Aerile Jackson, identified as "former mother." What does it mean to be a "former mother" and, in particular, what does it mean to be a "former mother" when one has never been able to lay claim on how mother means in the world? When, as Spillers has told us, Black life is an "enforced state of breach," and mother (like family) is a relation that loses meaning "since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations" What does this phrasing of "former mother" to describe a woman whose children have been taken from her (and likely placed into "care") tell us about the afterlives of slavery and the afterlives of property? Who, or perhaps what, bears the status of non/former/un mother when one's children are lost through death or because they are "held in the body of the state," and how does one become a former mother? Unless, that is, the word mother never took hold for Black women in and then out of slavery in the "New World." We are inundated with images of Black women in pain, of Black un/mothers grieving Black un/children. In Laboring Women Jennifer Morgan writes, "The challenge, for historians of the early Atlantic, at any rate, is to account for the equally innumerable acts of humanity, the ways in which men and women caught in the maelstrom of colonial upheavals reconfigured their subsequent sense of identity and possibility. Motherhood, for instance, cannot possibly remain unmodified when it is understood in the context of both the overwhelming commodification of the bodies of infants and their mothers, and the potential impulse women must have felt to interrupt such obscene calculations." "Motherhood...cannot possibly remain unmodified.""

"There is an extensive representational repertoire (photographic and discursive) of the conflation of blackness and death and multiple "commonsense" representations of Black maternity—and therefore the impossibility of Black childhood—as condemning one to a life of violence."

"What is a Black child? In the United States, conservatives simultaneously call for an end to abortion and extoll the imagined virtues of it. Recall Bill Bennett, former US Secretary of Education and "values czar": "If it were your sole purpose to reduce crime," Bennett said, "You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." This is an execrable arithmetic, a violent accounting. Another indication that the meaning of child as it abuts blackness, falls...apart. ... Think again of the multiple studies that tell us that though known to be in pain, Black people are "forced to endure more pain" and that Black children are consistently seen as being older than they are and therefore, never really considered children. Turn, in the United States, to the recent 2015 news story that described a white eighteen-year-old young man and a thirteen-year-old white girl child both fugitives from the law who stole cars, forged and stole checks, crossed state lines, and were armed, as "bonnie and Clyde" and as "teenage sweethearts." They did not describe the man as a predator and the girl as a prostitute( the two likely would have been described had they been Black), nor did they describe the pari of fas felons or as criminals who were armed and dangerous. No. This white pair was thrown a lifeline that extended to them a grammar that cohered in and around the human. They were extended a narrative that worked to make them legible and largely sympathetic. It was a narrative that first diminished the fact of, and then later the severity of, the many "criminal acts" that they committed; this narrative rearranged crime into romance."

"Following these graphic details, Dr. Goldberg concludes the lesson with a question. "Who," she asks, ",I>"do you think has the best chance of saving your life?" Her answer? "You do." I read in this question, as it arrives at the end of a graphic display of Black suffering, a narrative condemnation of "urban youth"; a wholesale abandonment of Black children to their own devices; a making manifest under the guise of education of the lives of Black children, not seen as children, being in their own hands as they face a series of catastrophes "unprepared for how terrible this would be." Wake; in the line of recoil of (a gun).

"In the aftermath of the murders of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut...a visibly shaken President Obama stepped up to the microphone to deliver words of "comfort and love from across the U.S." and the message that "'we' can only keep kids safe together."... "This job," he says, "of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together...In that way we come to realize that we bear responsibility for each other... Can we honestly say that we're doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm? Can we claim, as a nation, that we're all together there, letting them know that they are loved and teaching them to love in return? Can we say that we are truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose? ... We're not doing enough. And we will have to change... If there's even one step we can take to save another child... then surely we have an obligation to try."

...Put another way, when Obama spoke in Chicago at Hyde Park Academy he activated the orthography of the wake.... As he talked about his years working with communities on the South Side Obama said: "But what kept me going was the belief that with enough determination and effort and persistence and perseverance, change is always possible; that we may not be able to help everybody, but if we help a few then that propels progress forward. We may not be able to save every child from gun violence, but if we save a few, that starts changing the atmosphere in our communities..."

He is locked into that violent arithmetic in which blackness disrupts the figure of the child... The hold is what is taken as a given; it is the logic; it is the characterization of relation in that moment. Obama has succumbed to the logic of the hold. I am, we are, held and held. Obama's "moral agency" was one that was willing to accept a calculus that required Black death—and that depends, to quote Joy James, on "the screening out of black demands." We are returned here to Hartman: "Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, impoverishment.""


"That is, these images [of Black suffering] work to confirm the status, location, and already held opinions within dominant ideology about those exhibitions of spectacular Black bodies whose meanings remain unchanged. We have been reminded by Harman and many others that the repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violences enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within some communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the colonial project of violence."

June Jordan's The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America

[M. Ainomugisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the Wake is a conscious-shifting device that interrogates the myriad representations of Black life across time and space within its four main themes: The Hold, The Wake, The Ship, The Weather.

Christina Sharpe treads carefully into the archive and resuscitates images, films, literary and reporting works that have singularized Black life, then complicates them prolifically for the reader. In her tellings, she places routine emphasis on the gratuitous violences enacted upon Black lives across the diaspora and indexes various methods of thought and practice to counter this suspension.

In the Wake is a re-memorizing litany that generates room for even more possibilities.

Highly recommend for Black/cultural studies enthusiasts.

[Ryan G-M · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most brilliant thing I’ve read in a long time. Whatever the hell “Latinx studies” is should be abolished until everyone reads this book & relocates their work “in the wake.”

“So we are here in the weather, here in the singularity [of antiblackness]. Here there is disaster and possibility. And while ‘we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force.’”

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this book in one sitting. Beautiful, brilliant and groundbreaking. A must read.

[Tia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to review for many reasons. It took me longer than expected to finish because Sharpe does not shy away from heaviness. Her central ideas are very necessary and pose an important challenge to any number of fields. I did struggle a bit with the way that a lot of the examples only got a paragraph or two rather than close readings, which would have helped me better grasp some of her ideas more thoroughly, perhaps.

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in his excellent Silencing the Past , reminds us that the past does not “exist independently from the present…. [and] in no way can we identify the past as past.” The truth of this statement is becoming increasingly clear to many as struggles for restitution and more in the wake of historical injustices gain strength and profile. Christina Sharp’s powerful In the Wake explores some of the ways it means to live in the presence of that past in contemporary times.

In doing so she invokes several meanings of wake – the wake at the funeral, the wake of awareness, but most powerfully the wake of the ship. In this she grounds her discussions of Blackness in the chattel slavery that marks modernity, in the shipping of bodies across waters (powerfully linking the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary movement of refugees across the Mediterranean). In doing so she forceful brings Trouillot’s observation on the impossibility of ‘pastness’ to the fore. More so she weaves the wake of the ships of enslavement through the banality of Black lives – from Phyllis Wheatley being named for the ship that brought her across the Atlantic to the elision and redaction of Blackness from social worlds along with redaction as a reading tactic to recover Black voices.

It is a richly layered and subtle case that turns on forms of death – bodily and social, banal and violent, personal and public. These deaths/elisions/redactions take multiple forms – the woman who in a documentary discussed her children being taken into care, described in the credits as ’former mother’, the Haitian child waiting on medical evacuation after the 2010 earthquake with the label ‘ship’ stuck to her forehead. In these the slave ship haunts American life just as the contemporary overloaded refugee ship is seen as a threat to Europe: here are lives and deaths marred and marked by the wake of their respective ships, where holds are prisons and replicated by the contemporary state as much as the historic ones.

Throughout Sharp weaves together popular and high culture (to the extent that the distinction ever held), contemporary and historic struggles pointing to the concurrence of oppression, discomfort and resistance in the continuing presence of the past in the now. (What's more she does so invoking perhaps my favourite film and top five ever novels, Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust and that's always a winner.) It is a powerful, richly cast interweaving of literary analysis with social and historical being casting Blackness as a global condition produced and reproduced in the now as it was in the past. She’s a poetic and evocative writer meaning that this demands return visits during which I am sure I’ll discover new and unrecognised insights.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This is an account counter to the violence of abstraction, an account of surviving the ship when the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather and their un/survival repeat and repeat. An account of care as shared risk between and among the Black trans*asterisked.”

"In the Wake" is a poem, a narrative, a historical account, a cultural analysis, and a tribute: a tribute to those living both *in* and *in the wake of* transatlantic slavery. This is a brief book meant to be chewed carefully and shared widely; meant to sit with and cry over and when it ends, meant to inspire hope. Sharpe's wordplay works well in this case: when she discusses the wake as "a sitting-with" she references what her readers will do in the wake of reading a trans(*)historical account of blackness, being, and pain. She brings humanity to her characters –– those subjects of headlines and photos that she addresses again and again throughout the book –– and does them great justice while highlighting the ways in which other media outlets exploit them.

She has made me radically reconsider american institutions, to look at them as "ships" in form and in function, and to be more careful and openminded when tracing the lineages of chattel slavery. Again, I can't overstate Sharpe's use of the english language in this book: her wordwork is magical and inspired me as a writer, a creator, and as a student.

Read the notes. Click the links she cites (if on an ebook) or Google what she's talking about. Study the pictures. Look up words and let her help redefine language for you. Open new doors with In The Wake as your guide.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sharpe writes in a theoretically inflected academic vocabulary that turns on some automatic recoil reflexes, but after taking a couple of deep breaths, I relaxed into the style and emerged with an understanding of why In the Wake has become a primary touchstone in contemporary writing about African American texts (mostly literary, but also visual and experiential). In a sense, her point of departure will feel familiar to readers of The New Jim Crow (and the long historical/critical tradition it grows out of). She's intensely aware of the ways (the wake of) slavery continues to be lived in the bodies and lives of the African American diaspora. And she's convincing in her argument that this both requires and has at least begun to generate new modes of consciousness (Dionne Brand, Kara Walker, Kamau Braithwaite as key figures).

Part of me continues to feel there's not much new here--that an attendant reading of Invisible Man and Beloved, for example, leads to some of the same places. And there's way too much cross-referencing of the kinds of theorists who impress academics. But I understand that's part of what needs to be done to get tenure and at least the possibility of speaking more directly to those who haven't had the same seminars. That's snarkier sounding than I mean it to be, partly because I've seen young writers/academics responding to her approach in useful ways.

Ultimately her vision resonates with Ellison's notion of jazz as a never-ending attempt to redefine black (and human) possibility in relation to individual voice, communal dynamics, and a tradition which can't be divorced from slavery but also isn't quite defined by it.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tidalectic and highly detailed from the personal to the in/visible: Sharpe's In the Wake is an intensity stretched across histories of pain and awareness. Conceptually agile, Sharpe moves from theorizing the wake (in what I found to be the strongest section) to the ship, the hold, and, lastly, the weather. The writing is punctured (recalls) a number of talismanic or epigraphic orientations through other carefully chosen writers – the genealogy here is a mixture of black American cultural studies, feminist, and Caribbean thinkers, but reaches from time to time to Holocaust studies – and a powerful collection of images that Sharpe reads and rereads throughout the text. Highly readable – as if it was a conversation enriched with patience. Yes, yes please; and thank you.

[Kori · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is urgent & necessary, one of the best theoretical works I've read in my studies thus far. I need to sit with my thoughts a bit longer, will update this review soon.

[daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an incredible and thoughtfully done book, def something i will be returning to.

[Sarah Schulman]

Highly innovative and deep investigation: personal, historical, poetic, intellectual of the consequences of chattel slavery on Black being. Antiblackness is the climate, literally the weather, of this deep book.

[Krzys Chwala · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning theorization of the afterlives of slavery. Art as theory, theory as art. The writing is lyrical and accessible and there's so much to think with and about on each page.

[Feebrecht · Rating 5 out of 5]

Also non-academically nice to read. Do it.

[Bob Strad · Rating 5 out of 5]

She don’t miss. have yet to walk away unchanged from reading Sharpe. Saved this one for the end of the year as it was a little more challenging since it drew from a lot of black theorists/academics I haven’t yet read. Having limited interaction w traditional afropessism this read as something in conversation with Wilderson and Hartman. Still was approachable with some effort, the analysis of mixed media from the various films, poems, and journalism deff served as a latching point. I particularly enjoy this element of her writing style, this felt like an expansion of ordinary notes. Sharpe’s language of wake work and the lens she offers will likely have high mileage w me. Just good equipment to have being chronically online and constantly interacting w the climate of anti blackness via New York Times articles/journalist outlets, films, museum, etc

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me wish I could write like this!

[Sally Elhennawy · Rating 5 out of 5]

OBSESSED with how often Christina Sharpe namechecks Dionne Brand in this… a love story for the ages

[Akosua Adasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black redaction and annotation, redaction as annotation and vice versa is very important to me! I feel like what I like most about Sharpe is that her work invites you to think with her, so that you too can sound your ordinary note as an echo of hers

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like this idea of wake, and wake-work.

Could fit nicely into a narrative of the lamella, abjection, the zone of non-being, the vel of alienation.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

🌨⛈🌩🌊🌪🌫🌬

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book veered wildly between 1) gimmicky word games even e.e. cummings would be embarrassed by and 2) tediously overbearing and overlong recitations of partisan-leftist-framed wrongs done against the Black community in the US. Read it if you want a bizarrely un-self-aware hyperfixation upon every problem as a problem of Blackness/and/or/Blackness as the most important issue in society/politics. But it doesn't really argue that, it just states it, and then expects you to agree. The only reason Duke University published this is that it toed a partisan line, not that it added anything to the conversation.

The first half of the book explored in far too much depth and with far too many examples the multiple connotations of the word "Wake", as in the wake of a slave ship, a wake for the deceased, (a)wake as in not sleeping, etc. (oh yeah, and trendy manipulations like "non/being"; wow, so profound! especially when done in every other sentence!). The rest of the first half was comprised of word puns around "trans", such as "trans*port," "trans*late," and other forcings of trans-ness into the conversation.

I'm not really sure what this book was saying other than "please be a good person and agree with me, oh did I mention you need to agree with me? Vote blue otherwise you're a racist ;)" In lieu of arguments, the author chose a purely pathos approach, inserting photographs of oppressed Black children, white policemen wielding clubs, and other propagadnistic technologies. One of the most-repeated political issues in the book was that of "black bodies" (they mean black human beings, not just husks, that's disgustingly dehumanizing and I hate every time a leftist types that out unironically) migrating to Europe, but per the mind-numbing stupidity of the two party system in this God-forsaken country, the author never once questioned 1) Why so many people are fleeing their home countries or 2) why they're going to European countries. Also never considered is whether such countries are prepared logistically for such an influx of immigrants, it's merely seen as pure evil to ever act on anything other than your emotional gut instinct. Such impulsivity rivals that of a toddler, and despite the accolades and linguistic pretensions, the concepts herein fall short of such children.

Just listen to a Kendrick Lamar album instead of reading this, you'll learn much more about the Black experience and will also get a cool album in your brain as an added bonus.

[Zuri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an amazing book and tbh there are things I read in this book that will stick w me forever. Sharpe explores “the wake” as a way of thinking abt and understanding the effects of the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy on every black person, everyday. The analysis is so deep and expansive, and really connects so many experiences and events back to the legacy of slavery including Mike Brown & BLM, Beloved, Daughters of the Dust, Steve McQueen’s work, study abt black girl’s being criminalized in schools, Haiti earthquakes. I esp appreciated the inclusion of a black diaspora in the Caribbean bc as a 2.5 generation American (1 immigrant parent + 1 American parent) I obv feel the effects of the legacy of slavery here as an American person, but all of my ancestors were enslaved in the Caribbean not the US. It also added so many things to my reading list in the references (Zong!, Hartman, Some of Us Did Not Die). Pretty accessible as far as academic books go although I did look up many words and some of them I still lowkey don’t know the meaning of...

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is an unbelievably smart and emotional and detailed and did-i-say-SMART??? read... an amazing piece of scholarship and personal narrative... just incredibly well-thought and well-reasoned and full of intellectual rigor... so many meaningful words and phrases and passages... i was rather taken aback, as i expected great, but not stellar, and this was most assuredly stellar...plenty of "i need to look up this word" but in a challenging way, not a "yeah, i'm smarter than you!" way... seriously, this book is some head-expanding stuff... lots of sadness too, but when you are a black person writing about black people and slavery and racism and lots of other horrible things, it is expected... but i cannot emphasize enough how stupendously erudite this book is... poetic turns of phrase, multiple meanings, puns, expansive definitions of words, just an author who knows she is fabulous and wants to let you in on it... a joyous and enlivening read...

[Zach Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant interrogation of the structures of anti-Blackness and Black being in the afterlife of slavery. Sharpe cuts across cinema, literature, photography, art, journalism, and scholarship to delineate the essence of quotidian representations of what she calls the "orthography of the wake." The wake as a disturbance in water from a ship, a gathering of family and friends to send off the dead, and in the line of recoil of (a gun) reeeeeeeally spoke to me, and her transition from the wake (chapter 1) to the ship (chapter 2), the hold (chapter 3), and the weather (chapter 4) is not only brilliant, but also offers a path forward, in what she calls "wake work."

After reading her Monstrous Intimacies, I'm really glad I found her scholarship, and have already learned so much from her. In the Wake is another book that I took rigorous notes on and that I know I will repeatedly come back to.

[Senojecurbe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is genuinely groundbreaking. Genius on every page.

[Neha · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” (Sharpe, 19). Sharpe begins with the personal and weaves together observations, the horrors of history and our contemporary world, a wide range of critical race theory, as well as media such as photography, poetry, and film, she explains that "antiblackness is pervasive as climate," (Sharpe, 110).

Since I first read this in 2017, it has stuck with me how Sharpe explains the many facets of what it is to be in the wake:

"...living in the wake means living in and with terror in that in much of what passes for public discourse about terror we, Black people, become the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment, and not the primary objects of terror’s multiple enactments; the ground of terror’s possibility globally. This is everywhere clear as we think about those Black people in the United States who can “weaponize sidewalks” (Trayvon Martin) and shoot themselves while handcuffed (Victor White III, Chavis Carter, Jesus Huerta, and more), those Black people transmigrating the African continent toward the Mediterranean and then to Europe who are imagined as insects, swarms, vectors of disease; familiar narratives of danger and disaster that attach to our always already weaponized Black bodies (the weapon is blackness)." (Sharpe 25)

Wakes are processes; through them we think about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to enact grief and memory. Wakes allow those among the living to mourn the passing of the dead through ritual; they are the watching of relatives and friends beside the body of the deceased from death to burial and the accompanying drinking, feasting, and other observances, a watching practiced as a religious observance. But wakes are also “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship (figure 1.4); the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or one that is moved, in water; the air currents behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed flow; in the line of sight of (an observed object); and (something) in the line of recoil of (a gun)”; finally, wake means being awake and, also, consciousness." (Sharpe, 30)

In the wake, the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighborhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school. (Sharpe, 31)