Ordinary Notes

Locations
Call Number: 305.896 Sh, Black Studies 305.896 Sh
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	305.896 Sh	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Black Studies 305.896 Sh	4-week checkout	Due 05-22-2024

Told through a series of 248 notes, this volume explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake of it, touching upon such themes as language, beauty, memory, history and literature.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
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Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

A brilliant thinker submitted by redwood on July 12, 2023, 12:09pm Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) is one of my favorite academic books, not only for its contributions to Black studies but also for the ways Sharpe expands academic form. She is a poetic theorist, constantly insisting on personal experience not only as evidence, but as theory itself. Ordinary Notes pushes Sharpe’s methods even further, exploding genre. It is a series of 248 “notes,” none more than five pages in length. The notes are personal and familial anecdotes; pieces of history; analyses of artworks and museum exhibitions; commonplace collections of others’ words; questions and suppositions.

What is this book about? What isn’t this book about? Sharpe continues to organize her work around questions about Blackness, but there are no limits to what this encompasses, the range of philosophical questions and affective universes she covers. In Ordinary Notes, the punishing ordinariness of anti-Blackness sits alongside the imaginative pluripotency of Blackness, Black aliveness.

Sharpe unsettles master narratives of race and genre, utilizing aspects of memoir while refusing to become an instructive “race memoir.” The work echoes Citizen in places with short memories of anti-Black encounters, but exceeds it intellectually (and includes explicit critique of Claudia Rankine, among other thinkers).

The book is deeply intertextual, considering many other Black scholars and thinkers (and including some of their definitions “toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”) as well as structures of whiteness. An incisive series probes the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and how it might reify whiteness.

Sharpe’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe, is at the center of this book—grief over her passing (twenty-five years ago—grief never ends), the questions and ideas raised by her brilliant life.

This is the kind of book I dream of writing, so much broader and deeper than one in traditional long chapters. I also want to get a hard copy because some of the images didn’t render well in ebook form. Read Christina Sharpe. Read this book.