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

Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being draws on an evocative archive of Black artistic culture and scholarship that includes poetry, film, fiction, sculpture, photography, literary theory, and philosophy to describe the lived reality of Black life in "the afterlife of slavery"¹, and which perform what she calls "wake work" (13). Wake work, Sharpe argues, instantiates a "conceptual framework of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery."² As a critical play on the contemporary aphorism of "woke" work, Sharpe's reconceptualization of emancipatory possibility is steeped in a historicized and nuanced "mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme [of anti-blackness]"³ to (re)imagine otherwise and write against the interminable "work of melancholia and mourning." ⁴

Each of the four chapters in the book are chock-full of definitions of concepts (wake, ship, hold, weather, aspiration, to name a few), which are as fluid as the imagery that Sharpe conjures to describe the unrelenting violence that has been integral to the ebbs and flows of Black life since the first forced migration of Black bodies in the ship's hold during the Middle Passage. The most significant concept, the wake, that also anchors the title of this thought-provoking book, is, itself, steeped in multiple meanings:

Wake: the track left on the water's surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body swimming, or moved, in water⁵….Wake; the state of wakefulness; consciousness⁶….Wake; in the line of recoil of (a gun)⁷…. Wake: a watch or vigil held beside a body who has died, sometimes accompanied by ritual observances including eating and drinking⁸

Located in the first chapter, each of these definitions seep into the other chapters, extending the investigation of the cultural archives of Black life in order to find "'the agents buried beneath… the accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations, and misnamings"⁹ of the "everyday of Black immanent and imminent death, and…[to track] the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially"¹⁰.

My review is responsive to the context of this special issue on Blackness and Disability. Thus, my reading of Sharpe's book is through what Theri Pickens has described as the overlapping lenses of Blackness and disability. In doing so, I recognize that Blackness and disability exist in an uneasy tension, linked together by epistemic and material violences that proliferate in the wake of the collusive damages of anti-Blackness and ableism on Black life. In the Wake is replete with narratives of the volatile relationship between Blackness and disability in each chapter. Although Sharpe authors these overlaps, her analysis gestures towards, but does not foreground, the historical and material relationships between disability and Black life and the erasures and possibilities such an analysis could foreground. This review, therefore, marks these moments in the text in order to realize the richer theoretical and analytical gifts this book bestows.

The first chapter begins with a literal discussion of the wake "as a problem of and for thought"¹¹ by venturing into the personal. Here, Sharpe memorializes the deaths of several members of her immediate family whose "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment"¹² were structured at the intersections of Blackness and disability. Diagnosed with severe attachment disorder (on account of abuse suffered in his early life before adoption), her adopted nephew, Caleb, was fatally shot as he left his apartment on Pittsburgh's north side. Her cousin Robert, whom doctors diagnosed with schizophrenia, was shot in the back multiple times by Philadelphia police, even though he was unarmed. Her older brother, Stephen, lived with sickle cell disease and subsequently was diagnosed with malignant mesothelioma (perhaps obtained through prolonged exposure to asbestos from work in a local insulation company); upon his visit to the hospital, he was retained for troubled breathing...