In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe (review)

Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is a genre-bending text that is as theoretical as it is lyrical. In 1987, fellow literary critic Hortense Spillers declared “the conditions of the ‘Middle Passage’ some of the most incredible narratives available to the student,” and Sharpe’s Wake is one such work to take up the incredible terror of the transatlantic slave trade. In the Wake operates using a central theoretical metaphor that is diffuse in its application and meaning: one of ships, of boughs, of cresting waves, and of the ocean. Each chapter is named after a different maritime fixture or feature: “The Wake,” “The Ship,” “The Hold,” and, then finally, “The Weather.” These dictive choices cement the bedrock of Sharpe’s intellectual work in the echoes, reverberations, and derivative oppressive regimes that have emerged in the aftermath of chattel slavery.

In the Wake begins straight away—there is no preface or introduction, which lends to the immersive quality of the text’s content and style. The reader is immediately drawn into Sharpe’s theorization of Black violability, Black death, and Black living. She begins writing from a place of deeply personal grief: the deaths of her mother, an older sister, an older brother, and a nephew all in the span of a few years. What does it mean to write from a place of loss, of premature, untimely, and violent Black death so normalized that it comes to be expected? In the Wake grapples with these questions and Sharpe lingers with Black subjects’ “abjection from the realm of the human” rather than argue for a rights-based set of demands or even for justice as it is conceived in written law. In chapter 3, “The Hold,” Sharpe illustrates the futility of appeals to State powers to recognize and protect Black life and the implicit/explicit harm state-sanctioned deployments of “care” cause Black people through a description of the Cradle 2 Grave Youth Program at Temple Hospital. Cradle 2 Grave is meant to discourage North Philadelphia youth from participating in gun-related acts of violence, yet, as Sharpe’s analysis reveals, this program assaults primarily Black teenagers with grisly images of dead persons and morbid demonstrations involving body bags and stretchers for sessions lasting two hours or more. Sharpe lays bare that “Cradle 2 Grave exposes children, many of whom are already experiencing trauma from their material, lived violence, to photos and reenactments of graphic violence as a deterrent to more violence” (p. 88). The example of this outreach program perpetrating forms of the harm it claims to lessen is a micro-level example of the fundamental contradictions inherent in American and global conceptualizations of “justice” and “human rights” that claim impartiality but thrive on anti-Blackness.

Sharpe likens racism to “the engine that drives the ship of the state’s national and imperial projects,” writing that it “cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow” (p. 3). In the Wake is concerned with aftermaths, with leftovers, with effects and damages—Sharpe is more interested in the indentation than the actor that made the blow. Through an examination of visual art works such a Rodney Leon’s The Ark of the Return, Charles Gaines’s Moving Chains; an assortment of images, including a photo of B.A.R.T. police officer Johannes Mehersele taken on Oscar Grant’s cell phone shortly before Grant was murdered, photos from refugee camps in Malawi, and pictures of French and British brutality against North African immigrants and refugees; documentaries, poems, quotes, and theory from a host of diasporic thinkers, such as Fatou Diome, Canadian poet Dionne Brand, and C. L. R. James, Sharpe weaves together instance after instance of Black life in the wake.

Throughout the project, many permutations of “wake” are called forth to describe states of Black being. Sharpe evokes the traces and grooves left...