# In the Wake [[Christina Sharpe]] [Citation Link](https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake) *Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.* ## Description Sharpe reads literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life through the multiple senses of "wake" — the path left behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, and coming to consciousness — to theorize how slavery's afterlives continue to structure Black life in the diaspora. Organized around four extended metaphors ("the wake," "the ship," "the hold," "the weather"), the book argues that antiblackness is "total climate" while also tracking the Black artistic and quotidian practices — "wake work" — that make life possible in and against that climate. ## Key Tags #black-study #critical-theory ## Key Passages - "In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack." (*The Weather*; page TBD — confirm against print edition) ## Notes by Chapter %% Reading notes pending a full pass against the print/PDF text; chapter structure confirmed via publisher table of contents. %% ### The Wake Memoir of family loss, absence and silence. distance in time. autobiographical to counter "violence of abstraction": Hartman Parallels of social and individual movement from middle class to working poor precarity terror is disaster #### Parallel Disasters > “So, the same set of questions and issues are presenting themselves to us across these historical periods. It [is] the same story that is telling itself, but through the different technologies and processes of that particular period. (Saunders 2008a, 67)” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 5) | personal level | social level | | -------------- | ----------------------------- | | | transatlantic chattel slavery | | | holocaust | | | antiblack violence | **Wakefulness** - individual experience, subjections, circumstances reflexive of antiblack cultural structures. "she worked at joy": 4. "In other words, even as we experienced, recognized, and lived subjection, we did not simply or only live in subjection and as the subjected.": 4 "my family lived an awareness of itself as, and in, the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation": 5 “Like Hartman I include the personal here, “to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction” (Hartman 2008, 7).” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 8) “I include the personal here to connect the social forces on a specific, particular family’s being in the wake to those of all Black people in the wake;” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 8) *Opportunity* as Latin *OB-* "toward" and *-Portu* "Port": 3 #### The Wake as: - "track left" behind, a "region of disturbed flow": 3 - *"the state of wakefulness; consciousness"*: 4 - "a problem of and for thought": 5 - “a watch or vigil held beside the body of someone who has died": 10 - Vigil | Vigilance: 10 **The *"optic of the door"*: 4 from [[Dionne Brand]] *A Map to the Door of No Return* (on her retina)** "racism. the engine that drives the ship of state's national and impesrial projects ("the american ship of state... the ark of the covenant that authorized both liberty and slavery": DeLoughrey 2010, 53) cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow.": 3 "thinking needs care (“all thought is Black thought”)| 9 and that thinking and care need to stay in the wake.": 5 “And while the wake produces Black death and trauma—“violence . . . precedes and exceeds Blacks” (Wilderson 2010, 76)—we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 11) Memory for Forgetting: course name from [[Judith Butler]] [[Mahmoud Darwish]] “dis/appearance” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 12) [[Visibility and Opticality]] [[Opacity and Aporia]] “I argue that rather than seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection, one might approach Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 14) “what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 14) see: [[LaMonda Horton Stallings]] [[Fred Moten]] “representing the [[Opacity and Aporia|paradoxes]] of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 14) #### “Wake Work” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 17) [[Dionne Brand]] - *[[Verso 55]]* > “When I finally arrived at the door of no return, there was an official there, a guide who was either a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler. But even if he was a man in his ordinary life or an idiot or a dissembler, he was authoritative. Exhausted violet, the clerk interjects. Yes he was says the author, violet snares. For some strange reason he wanted to control the story. Violet files. Violet chemistry. Violet unction. It was December, we had brought a bottle of rum, some ancient ritual we remembered from nowhere and no one. We stepped one behind the other as usual. The castle was huge, opulent, a going concern in its time. We went like pilgrims. You were pilgrims. We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were. Our gods were in the holding cells. We awakened our gods and we left them there, because we never needed gods again. We did not have wicked gods so they understood. They lay in their corners, on their disintegrated floors, they lay on their wall of skin dust. They stood when we entered, happy to see us. Our guide said, this was the prison cell for the men, this was the prison cell for the women. I wanted to strangle the guide as if he were the original guide. It took all my will. Yet in the rooms the guide was irrelevant, the gods woke up and we felt pity for them, and affection and love; they felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive we said. And we had returned to thank them. You are still alive, they said. Yes we are still alive. They looked at us like violet; like violet teas they drank us. We said here we are. They said, you are still alive. We said, yes, yes we are still alive. How lemon, they said, how blue like fortune. We took the bottle of rum from our veins, we washed their faces. We were pilgrims, they were gods. We sewed the rim of their skins with cotton. This is what we had. They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen. We all stood there for some infinite time. We did weep, but that is nothing in comparison. —Dionne Brand, Verso 55” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 17) “**(the keeping watch with the dead, the path of a ship, a consequence of something, in the line of flight and/or sight, awakening, and consciousness)** and we join the wake with work in order that we might make the wake and wake work our analytic” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 17) “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 18) "how does one mourn the interminable event? ...wake work troubles mourning" “That is, if museums and memorials materialize a kind of reparation (repair) and enact their own pedagogies as they position visitors to have a particular experience or set of experiences about an event that is seen to be past, how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 20) “slavery’s continued unfolding is constitutive of the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of Black non/ being as well as Black aesthetic and other modes of deformation and interruption.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 20) “As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence, for the less-than-human being condemned to death.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 21) “At stake is not recognizing antiblackness as total climate. At stake, too, is not recognizing an **insistent Black visualsonic resistance to that imposition of non/being**.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 21) “I want In the Wake to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from there.” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 22) ### The Ship Traces how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora. ### The Hold Follows "the hold" from the belly of the slave ship into its contemporary manifestations in policing and incarceration ### The Weather Develops a theory and method for reading the metaphors and materiality of "the weather" — the way antiblackness operates as ambient, total climate producing containment, regulation, and premature death ## Details %% none yet %% ### Concepts and Theories - [[Black Studies]] - "the wake" as of slavery's afterlives "How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?” - [[Visibility and Opticality]] - "dis/appearance" (Sharpe, 2016, p. 12) ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Related Individuals - [[Christina Sharpe]] - author ## References ### Cited In %% none yet %%