# Christina Sharpe

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe (born 1965) is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Christina Sharpe is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and in 2024 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

## Education

Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child. She received a bachelor's degree in English and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, having studied abroad at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head.

## Career and research

Christina Sharpe is a prominent Black studies scholar whose work spans Black visual studies, Black queer studies, and mid-nineteenth century to contemporary African-American Literature and Culture.
Sharpe may be best known for the influential concept of "wake work" that she detailed in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which was published in 2016. In this piece, she probes into the legacies of transatlantic slavery to frame the lives of Black people and how that manifests in contemporary social, cultural, and political lives. "Wake work" calls for insurgent engagement with the ways that Black life and death are figured by anti-Blackness, into practices of survival, remembrance, and resistance in African culture.
Her previous book was Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, published in 2010. The book explores ways in which narration, relation, and representation come together to forge Black subjects and identities in a post-Chattel slavery era. Throughout the book, Sharpe investigates how the legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and racial violence continue to be present in Black communities and uses critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to analyse these times.
Her research has also extended into Black visual studies through the critical analysis of Blackness in visual media, such as films, photography, and contemporary art. In this respect, her work has made a point that such visual representations further or resist colonial and racial narratives by looking at how Black artists engage with and almost fight against these various narratives.
In addition to her books, Sharpe has written essays in various academic journals and edited volumes on issues such as memory and trauma, among others, regarding Black opportunity. Her work is recognized for creative techniques that lend to an understanding of Black living in a world defined by historical enslavement and contemporary systematic racism. Further contributions have been made in Black studies, immigrant studies, and other areas of critical literary thought; she has also lectured at academic conferences and public events.

### Employment

Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 1996 to 1998. From 1998 until 2018 she held positions at Tufts University. Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017. She was the first Black woman to be awarded tenure in the English department at Tufts. Sharpe is a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), at the University of Johannesburg.
She is a professor and research chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities in the Black Canadian Studies certificate program At York University.

### Books

She is the author of award-winning books: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. and Ordinary Notes. She wrote a critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010).

### Monstrous Intimacies (2010)

In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe concerns herself with sexual-racial economies and the "monstrous intimacies" that percolate within, which she describes as "a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous". Sharpe's articulation is contingent upon an oppositional knowledge that holds in tension freedom and subjection, love and hate; indulging in a "diasporic study" that attempts a "complex articulation" of the sexual economies of slavery to denote how power is constructed at the site of the interpersonal and the intimate. Foregrounding Douglass' primal scene as a scene of subjectivation and objectivation and, later, locating the primality in James Henry Hammond's letters and, later still, Jones' text, Sharpe provides an account of its "psychic and material reach" and its subsequent (re)performances of a double/dubbed birth within sites of monstrous intimacies — the blood-stained gate and the Door.

### In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)

Her second book, In the Wake on Blackness and Being, was published in 2016 by Duke University Press. The publishers write of it:
{{quote|In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the 'orthography of the wake.' Activating multiple registers of 'wake'—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such 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.

### Reception of Books and Critiques

Christina Sharpe's written works have been praised for their contributions to Black studies and critical theory. Her 2010 book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, was considered one of the most interdisciplinary works to date, given its mixture of literature, psychoanalysis, and cultural history in developing a concept on how chattel slavery continues to contour understandings of contemporary Black subject life. Critics and readers noted, however, that it contained dense theoretical language which was considered challenging for general audiences to fully understand the piece.
Her 2016 work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, received similar feedback, garnering acclaim for its blend of personal narrative with a combination of historical and theoretical analysis. Her work has become an essential reading in Black studies and is frequently cited throughout scholarly literature. However, similar to her previous work, the complex theoretical nature of the piece has been demanding for those outside academic circles or without significant involvement in the subject.
Likewise, Ordinary Notes has also gathered a range of varying responses. Many reviewers commend its innovative structure and insights into Black life. Kirkus Reviews described it as "an exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness," highlighting Sharpe's integration of diverse forms and topics. Similarly, The New York Times noted how Sharpe's collection of notes serves as a radical reading of Black life, presenting an alternative to popular misconceptions.
However, some critics have pointed out challenges related to the book's fragmented format. The Chicago Review of Books mentioned that while the versatile form supports the ambitious range of subjects, the kaleidoscopic structure might make it difficult for readers looking for a traditional narrative arc. This was echoed by other critics as well, stating that although the structure is innovative, it may pose challenges for readers accustomed to conventional storytelling.

## Awards

* In the Wake:
** Finalist, 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction
** The Guardian, "Best Books of 2016"
** The Walrus, "Best Books of 2016" the James Tait Black Prize in Biography
* Ordinary Notes:
** Winner, 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
** Finalist, 2023, National Book Award
** Finalist, 2023, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction
** Finalist, 2023, The Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award
** Finalist, 2023, The James Tait Black Prize in Biography
** The New York Times, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
** The Atlantic, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
** The New Yorker, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
** The Globe and Mail, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
** The Toronto Star, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
** NPR, "Best Book of the Year 2023"
* Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction. (2024)
* Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities. (2024)
* Named Guggenheim Fellow. (2024)

## Works (selection)

* Ordinary Notes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023
* In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016.
* Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.
* Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022.