In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Initiating & describing a theory & method of reading the metaphors & materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," & "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks & haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora & how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, & punishment, but also something in excess of them. 

In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness & white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake & "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, & possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

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Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.