Christina Sharpe Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Christina Sharpe is an American author popularly known for her 2016 book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. She is also an academic working as a professor of Black Studies and English literature at York University in Toronto, Canada. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in English and African studies. She received her master’s degree and a doctorate at Cornell University.

Christina was a finalist in the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction for her book In the Wake. The book also won the Best Books of 2016 from The Guardian and The Walrus, respectively. Ordinary Notes book won the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. It was also a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award and a 2024 Windham Campbell Prize winner in the category of nonfiction books.

On December 30, 2017, Erica Garner (a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement and daughter of Eric Garner, who died at the hands of police in Staten Island, New York) passed away from a heart attack at the young age of 27. This tragic loss emphasizes the heavy toll that systemic racism exacts on African Americans in the United States.

Christina Sharpe’s book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, delves into these major issues. It examines the themes of citizenship, racial violence, and black mortality. Sharpe weaves her personal experiences with death and the concept of “the wake” into a critical analysis of cultural frameworks. She reimagines historical metaphors related to slavery, funerals, and death to challenge and reshape perspectives.

Sharpe introduces the concept of “the wake and wake work,” which explores how black identity and civil rights are entangled within the ongoing legacies of slavery. She argues that being in “the wake” means navigating the unresolved aftermath of slavery, continually shaped by historical and contemporary forces.

Sharpe engages with literary figures like Kamau Brathwaite, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip through her study. These figures use rhetoric and visual representation to highlight the complexities of black existence. She draws on the scholarship of Kimberly Juanita Brown, Saidiya Hartman, and Frank Wilderson to deepen her exploration of the enduring impacts of slavery on black lives.

Sharpe’s work does not seek definitive solutions to excluding black people from political, legal, or philosophical spheres. Instead, it aims to analyze how cultural producers- writers, artists, and musicians- depict and confront the pervasive and contradictory legacies of slavery across transatlantic spaces.

Sharpe’s approach in her book diverges from typical studies on black exclusion. It focuses on current everyday calamities to explore what survives persistent black marginalization. She critically examines how cultural texts handle this theme.
Each chapter of Sharpe’s book symbolizes a facet of the slave ship and its ongoing influence on global black experiences.

Sharpe’s interdisciplinary approach is a key strength, particularly in reshaping the language around slavery’s enduring impacts. She explores concepts like “woke” and “wake work,” shedding light on their significance in contemporary social consciousness and justice movements.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being tackles contemporary cultural issues by delving into race, gender, and violence in the twenty-first century. Sharpe’s eloquent and approachable writing style sets a precedent for those seeking to challenge conventional academic norms. Ideal for graduate seminars focusing on themes like ‘The Black Atlantic,’ this book pairs well with works by Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, Charles Johnson, and Claudia Rankine. As black death persists across the global diaspora, Sharpe’s work encourages further scholarship that critically examines pervasive antiblackness.

In her remarkable work Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe explores recent stormy and often painful events. She questions what is fiercely contested and what new possibilities are imagined in our current era. This unique book weaves together various elements into a whole and documents the everyday experiences of antiblack racism alongside what Sharpe terms “Black notes” – ways of living, seeing, and surviving that disrupt these oppressive forces.

True to its title, Ordinary Notes is structured as numbered notes. Ranges from brief sentences to longer passages. This stylistic flexibility allows Sharpe to traverse cultural criticism, literary analysis, and memoir, adopting detached, vulnerable, incisive, furious, intimate, confrontational, or abstract tones as the subject demands.

The breadth of this format matches the book’s ambitious scope. For instance, one-chapter critiques monuments to historical atrocities, like a Louisiana plantation site and Montgomery’s Legacy Museum. It challenges narratives that sanitize violence as isolated incidents rather than foundational and ongoing.

Sharpe also embarks on explorations such as creating entries for a “dictionary of untranslatable blackness.” She probes concepts like memory, elegance, and gaze from Black perspectives within the diaspora. She delves into issues of personal and collective memory, the impact of digital documentation of police brutality, and the pervasive lens of whiteness that perpetuates white innocence across various contexts.

Interwoven within these discussions are memoirist fragments, including Sharpe’s encounters with racism during childhood, memories of her family, and numerous poignant reflections on her mother. These personal narratives not only serve as tributes and elegies but also illuminate the crucial role of the “Black maternal” in Sharpe’s survival and identity.

Ordinary Notes shares an affinity with the book-length lyric essay but asserts its form through the discrete spacing around each note, which punctuates and amplifies its message independently of other parts. This metaphorical approach resembles a pointillist painting, where each dot contributes uniquely to the whole.

Central to Sharpe’s exploration is visibility and invisibility within cultures and institutions. She critically examines the power dynamics embedded in photography and the choices made in representing racist violence, such as lynching and police brutality, in visual art and media. The inclusion of full-color images throughout the text enriches these discussions. The book includes Sharpe’s photographs of monuments, Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker artworks, iconic historical images, and even personal mementos like her mother’s handmade dress and cherished books.

Ordinary Notes is a profound meditation on perception and recognition. It challenges us readers to reconsider how we see and unsee the world around us. It encapsulates Sharpe’s rigorous engagement with images and their narratives, offering a layered exploration that invites deeper reflection on race, memory, and representation in modern society.