In the Wake Audiobook By Christina Sharpe cover art

In the Wake

On Blackness and Being

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In the Wake

By: Christina Sharpe
Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
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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.

©2016 Duke University Press (P)2022 Audible, Inc. African American Studies Black & African American Social Sciences Specific Demographics Haunted African American United States Americas Literary History & Criticism Cultural & Regional Biographies & Memoirs Literary Biography
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I’m grateful that the audiobook narrator did such an important work justice. Necessary reading for all Americans.

Necessary reading

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Christina Sharpe always astounds me - her probing era bending analysis, her extraordinary attention to detail and tying of historical moments and cultural creations together with precision and grace and her careful selection of words so that her writing washes over us in waves of pure beauty and pain. It is an honor to spend time with her words and her wisdom!

Pure brilliance!

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Dr Shadow’s writing helped me see and feel the ‘disaster and possibility’ that is life in America for every person who is not white.

What a force

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I found out about this book via the ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS section of Ross Gay’s BE HOLDING. In that section of his amazing book he credits this book with helping him understand the structure of BE HOLDING. I’ve listened to this book three times now. It gets better every time.

This is a book length poem that seamlessly weaves in and out of every facet of life.

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