Being in the Wake

"Listen," said a friend of mine. "There's only two things I have to do—be black and die." Everybody dies. But the way she spoke gave "black" the force of causality. It startled me, her implied equation between being black and death. My friend, exasperated, was trying to tell me something about her life, its difference from mine. Being black, she lived a relation to death that I, first world white guy, never would. Two things to do, be black and die. Really, the same thing.

Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being ponders the historical emergence and contemporary operation of a cultural logic that consigns black life to death. Its consequences lie all around us (by which I mean all of us): "Miriam Carey, Glenda Moore, Jordan Dunn, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Holloway, Sandra Black, Eric Garner, Jonathan Crawford, Rekia Boyd, Yvette Smith, Laquan McDonald, and many more" (87). As this grim litany attests, a terminal logic targets blacks. "Perils are not now, and never have been," Sharpe says, "evenly distributed" (55). That the particular peril of being black has deadly consequences—that death is unevenly distributed—should provoke outrage in a liberal society ostensibly built to secure the lives of all its members. But it hasn't—until now. With courage, grace, and harrowing clarity, Sharpe's book shows why.

She begins close to home with a description of the many ways being black opens her own family to that premature mortal touch. I won't share the details but note only that death visits her people often and in a variety of guises, all manifesting that terminal logic. Sharpe names that logic, its history and operation, "the wake." African Americans live in the wake of an enterprise fundamental to both global capitalism and black expendability: chattel slavery, over three centuries of European trade in Africans around the Atlantic. Sharpe follows Saidiya Hartman in anatomizing the "afterlives of slavery," but with a keen eye for signs of morbidity, "the fact of Black life as proximate to death" (17).

She describes the wake "as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery" (3). Gauging its fetch, she exploits multiple meanings to theorize its effects: as trail (ship), as recoil (gun), as ritual mourning, as woke consciousness. The wake works in multiple ways to ally blackness with nonbeing because "slavery's continued unfolding is constitutive of the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, and material dimensions of non/being" (20). Black life occurs in the wake of a history that continues to condone the death of blacks: "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" (15). To be (black) is not to be. In the wake of slavery, ontologically speaking, blacks are always already dead: "the ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people are normative and, for this so-called democracy, necessary; it is the ground we walk on" (7).

Or rise above. If the aftermaths of slavery are still unfolding, so are efforts to undo it. Emancipation leaves its wake too. It remains an "unfinished project" (5). In the Wake aspires not simply to describe the cultural logic of black non/being but more efficaciously to disturb its operation. Sharpe wants—and invents, her great contribution—a new way of working critically in the wake, one that advances possibilities for living beyond the non/being reserved for blackness. She wants to "sound a new language" for thinking and writing—conscious being—in the wake (19). She wants what she calls "wake work," a means of cultural engagement that tries "to imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery, in slavery's afterlives, to survive (and more) the afterlife of property" (18).

Here's what's new about Sharpe's wake work. With enviable disregard for the protocols of academic history, it gathers a wide range of disparate...