In the Wake: A Salon in Honor of Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe’s paradigm shifting new work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Invoking the multiple meanings of the term “wake”—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe details how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and describes what survives despite insistent violence and negation. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward. Join us for a captivating conversation between Christina Sharpe and Hazel Carby, Kaiama Glover, Arthur Jafa, and Alex Weheliye.