In the Wake

"This could have been a one thousand page book, filled with 'evidence,' citations and systematic 'proof,' but instead it is an earned, slim volume of poetic, intellectual and, in fact, spiritual enactment of struggle. In this way, In The Wake is an effective, personal conversation with the reader that uses both fact, image, and emotion, legitimately, to illuminate argument." — Sarah Schulman, Lambda Literary Review

"With In the Wake, Christina Sharpe looks out from the text and really tries to see us, both those here and gone, living and dead, in the wake, for all we are. We might begin, anew, by carefully looking back—double emphasis on care."
  — John Murillo III, Make

"In the Wake is a necessary chapter in a lengthy tome of ending white supremacy." — Jonathan Russell Clark, Literary Hub

"Mourning can be and has been a politics, but it must avoid becoming only a litany of horrors. Refusing melancholy in favor of care, In the Wake understands mourning as a practice embedded in living, and vice versa. Sharpe’s beautiful book enacts this indistinctness through pulling language apart and putting it to new purposes." — Hannah Black, 4Columns

(Best Books of 2016) "The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living." — Madeleine Thien, The Guardian

"In the Wake is work that holds space for what is unbearable and insists on letting it remain unbearable."
  — Johanna Hedva, Mask Magazine

"[A] masterclass on form, and a must-read for those of us committed to the beautiful sentence, as well as the work of what is commonly called theory."  — Joshua Bennett, Poets & Writers

"Christina Sharpe [is] one of the boldest and most brilliant academics of our time. . . . In the Wake is one of those rare academic books at once rigorously argued and multiply engaging: intellectually, stylistically, emotionally." — David Chariandy, Transition

"The present is saturated with grief about black lives in the wake of violence, being awake to the deaths and erasures can potentially create a future that can expand on being in the wake for more liveable lives of the black diaspora. It can also be the site of wake work, of attempts at creating social justice out of the metaphor Sharpe gives us.... Sharpe’s work has come at the right time."  — Angelina Eimannsberger, Indulgence

"In Sharpe’s probing work, the specter of slavery continues to haunt black subjects long after its abolition.... Sharpe’s book ... creates fruitful lines of exploration for political theorists concerned about the ethos of citizenship necessary for confronting white supremacy." — Alex Zamalin, Political Theory

"In the Wake is at times difficult to read - not because of the prose, which is superb, but because of the unending tragedy. Yet the book leaves the reader energized. Works of intellectual daring tend to do this. They point the way to further inquiry and further feats of the imagination. The book kept reminding me of William Faulkner's line: "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Requiem for a Nun) and anyone who reads it will revel in the intelligence, the lyricism, the research, and understand that the wake work has just begun." — JJ Amaworo Wilson, PM Press blog

"[A]t once meditative and theoretical, stylistically meticulous and spacious, intensely personal and a work of assembly.” — Matt Hooley, Antipode

"Sharpe’s project operates as a praxis of attendance that requires one to be with and to carry—not to watch, but to hold—the present traumas and indignities forced upon Black people and to simultaneously persist, to insist Black life, expression, love, and future in and through the wake of deliberate antiblack trauma that is firmament, soil, water, and climate." — Elizabeth J. Cali, Papers on Language and Literature

"Sharpe’s poetic and accessible prose can serve as a model for anyone who wants to challenge traditional conventions of academic writing. This book is perfect for a graduate seminar about 'The Black Atlantic' and complements texts by Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, and Claudia Rankine. With the continued and encouraged proliferation of black death in the global diaspora, Sharpe’s study will, hopefully, usher in more woke scholarship that questions pervasive antiblackness." — Dana Horton, Lateral

"One of the gifts of this book is Sharpe’s dexterous handling of orthography; wake comes to have multiple meanings, including the trail of waves of a ship as a metaphor for ongoing traces of the violence of slavery as well as the period of sitting and tending to the dead." — Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Meridians

"My most valuable discovery [in 2018] was the work of Christina Sharpe, a scholar of breathtaking range whose most recent book is In the Wake, about the aftershocks of chattel slavery in the Americas." — Parul Sehgal, New York Times

"Sharpe’s analytic is an intervention that invites us to revisit, interrogate, and reconceptualize what it means to perform intellectual labor with an element of care, attending to the complexities and contradictions of Black being in the world." — Cornel Grey, Critical Ethnic Studies

"Sharpe's work contributes a generative theoretical language to the vast corpus of scholarship on the ongoing relegation of Black subjects to zones of political, social, and ontological non-being. Unlike much of this literature, however, Sharpe's work forgoes concerns with melancholia, mourning, and memorial . . . Instead, Sharpe seeks out ways of seeing, imagining, and accounting for the 'modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, and despite Black death' (20)." — Sarah Fong, e-misférica

"A refreshing intervention into contemporary work in black studies on the afterlife of slavery. . . . Sharpe’s work offers a precise, concise formulation that is both and neither optimism and/nor pessimism, offering a possibility for work in black studies to not need to declare a 'side' of this binary." — Jesse A. Goldberg, ASAP/Journal

"So many contemporary artists and scholars have been changed by the book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, by Christina Sharpe, which examines the legacy of black death in the context of chattel slavery. Before, you would hear people talk about and quote Audre Lorde as if black feminist thought were something in the past, and not happening now. There has been some focus on black radical thought, but there has never been a focus on black feminist theory, which seems to be starting to happen. And I’m really happy about it." — Simone Leigh, in, New York Times Magazine

"Sharpe traces every wound back to every knife back to every bladesmith. I've been both protector and prey, both war and prayer: In the Wake helps answer each clash, it draws a thread through the multitudes of our grief. How Black life pays for its offering and for its pain and for its gift. . . . This book here is a guide, a deeply personal and intellectual exploration of Blackness, it gives us a complete look at how our beginning shapes our end." — Mustafa, CBC Books

"This is a book that feels necessary and also generative: it works with ideas and metaphors that have lingered in my mind and that are clearly lingering the mind of writers who have read it."
  — Rebecca Hussey, Reading Indie

"In the Wake has passed, like a game of telephone, from person to person mostly through word of mouth. . . . Through this single text, I am witnessing a new intellectual renaissance. One that, in real time, I can track. . . . In the Wake inspires us toward an analytic that disrupts the violent winds of history through the combined power of our bespoke wake work." — Hafizah Augustus Geter, Harper's Bazaar