The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought
April 26, 2023 10:14 AM   Subscribe

Christina Sharpe is expanding the vocabulary of life in slavery’s long shadow — peeling back the meaning of familiar words and resurrecting neglected history. [NY Times Magazine] What would it mean to understand all of American life as still caught in the wake, still caught in the undertow of the ships that carried the enslaved? Sharpe also put forth the metaphors of the ship (the processes by which Black people are still seen as property), the hold (the ways that captivity and punishment are still central to Black life) and the weather (the ambient anti-Blackness that is as pervasive as climate).
posted by Ahmad Khani (2 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
Living in/the wake of slavery is living “the afterlife of property” and living the afterlife of partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb), in which the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother. That inheritance of a non/status is everywhere apparent now in the ongoing criminalization of Black women and children. Living in the wake on a global level means living the disastrous time and effects of continued marked migrations, Mediterranean and Caribbean disasters, trans-American and -African migration, structural adjustment imposed by the International Monetary Fund that continues imperialisms/colonialisms, and more. And here, in the United States, it means living and dying through the policies of the first US Black president; it means the gratuitous violence of stop-and-frisk and Operation Clean Halls; rates of Black incarceration that boggle the mind (Black people represent 60 percent of the imprisoned population); the immanence of death as “a predictable and constitutive aspect of this democracy” (James and Costa Vargas 2012, 193, emphasis mine). Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continu- ous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased.
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 15
posted by Ahmad Khani at 10:46 AM on April 26, 2023 [4 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. I read the article this morning, and while I found the article itself not entirely my thing, it made me want to read Sharpe's writing and I'm looking forward to doing so soon.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:29 PM on April 26, 2023


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