Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those monstrous intimacies and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams s declaration of freedom in "Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom...

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those monstrous intimacies and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams s declaration of freedom in "Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom...

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. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the...