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  • Afterlives of Slavery, Epistemologies of Race:Black Women and Wake Work
  • Sohomjit Ray (bio)
Kimberly Juanita Brown's The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015
Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016
Natasha Trethewey's Monument: Poems New and Selected, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018

The discernible connection shared by all three books under consideration here—two academic texts and one collection of poems—is that they all offer insightful meditations on the long afterlives of transatlantic slavery and the epistemological emergence of the category of race. In the second chapter of In the Wake, Christina Sharpe observes that "the question for theory is how to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery's afterlives, the afterlife of property, how, in short, to inhabit and rupture this episteme with their, with our, knowable lives" (2016, 50). The their in this sentence refers to Africans like those aboard the slave ship Zong, which set sail in 1781 from West Africa with twice the allowed "cargo" toward Jamaica, entering those abducted into the violent "racial calculus" (Hartman 2007, 6) of the slave trade in which human beings became property; the our in this sentence includes several generations of the African diaspora whose lives follow in the wake of slavery, like the unnamed girl-child described in Sharpe's book, with the single word Ship attached in tape to her forehead, waiting to be rescued after the disastrous earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Sharpe's early refusal of the lie that slavery and its scaffolded logics are a matter of the past clears the ground for what she terms "wake work": the simultaneous inhabiting and rupturing of epistemological bases derived from slavery. In taking the knowability of these lived truths for granted, Sharpe is left free to not merely offer evidence of "our abjection from the realm of the human" but also to ask what survives the "ontological negation" of black lives in the diaspora (2016, 14). The most significant theoretical interventions in response to the second imperative are given in the last two [End Page 60] chapters, where Sharpe formulates three interlinked concepts and pedagogies: anagrammatical blackness, black redaction, and black annotation.

After presenting the example of Glenda Moore—who was denied shelter on Staten Island during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and condemned as an unfit mother after this act of cruelty resulted in the death of her two young sons—Sharpe asks what semiotic process scrambles meaning when blackness is seen to qualify otherwise stable categories of "human." Building on Fred Moten's observation that blackness effectively functions as "an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line" and "pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood" (Moten 2003, 1), Sharpe arrives at her description of anagrammatical blackness as "blackness's signifying surplus: the ways that meaning slides, signification slips, when words like child, girl, mother, and boy abut blackness" (2016, 80). It's this signifying surplus that explains how girl may not mean girl, but prostitute, or how mother suddenly becomes synonym for "birther of terror" (77). Black annotation and black redaction are explained as tools of resistant praxis, where the signifying surplus is redacted while annotation with care brings the black child into view as a child again.

Despite Sharpe's commitment to this ethic of care, a few blind spots remain in a short text of such expansive scope. Sharpe's frame is steadfastly ontological, leaving her early promise of a more materialist critique largely unfulfilled. Sharpe includes the African continent—its present and past colonization, and contemporary migrations from Africa under duress of global capital flows—in the history that has seen black lives annotated and redacted. But this parenthetical inclusion of Africa, although thrilling in its promise of a pan-African solidarity, highlights instead that Sharpe's engagement with the continent in doing wake work remains contingent on whether it fits her self-imposed framework that is more ontological than materialist. Incorporating Africa as a conditional afterthought contradicts Sharpe's call to care as a guiding premise of doing wake work.

Published a year before In the Wake, Kimberly...

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