Countercurrents: Book Review of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Christina Sharpe’s 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, published by Duke University Press, examines various representations of Black life including the literary, cinematic, visual, and everyday life experiences of Black people. She offers a cipher to navigate the unspeakable and unknowable realities of existing in the violent afterlives of transatlantic slavery. To live while Black in the diaspora is to live in the “wake”: it means contending with those afterlives that refuse to respect boundaries of place or time where the past, present, and future unpredictably collide and melt into one another. The ship acts as the fundamental image of this logic, creating a context through which we can better understand how anti-Blackness permeates the social, political, and economic structures that shape Black life in obscured but palpable ways. Within this imagery, Sharpe unpacks the transformation that bodies, time, and language undergo in the hold and explores how we might actively insist against these dehumanizing logics through a practice she terms “wake work”.

Sharpe’s work is firmly grounded in the Black feminist theoretical tradition as she engages in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Rankine, and Dionne Brand, among others, to lay bare the intricacies of living in the space of the unthought and unremembered. In Chapter 1, “The Wake”, she details the various definitions of the word “wake” and how those definitions permeate black life. The first instantiation of the wake that Sharpe describes is that of the slave ships bound across the Atlantic and what propelled those ships forward: “Racism, the engine that drives the ship of state’s national and imperial project…cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow” (3). Sharpe at once gestures to the way anti-Black racism operates beyond the boundaries of nation-states and beyond time itself. Particularly within the context of the United States, anti-black racism is not incidental to the country’s founding, but is rather the basis upon which its entire democracy is predicated.

In Chapter 2, “The Ship”, Sharpe uses the documentary film The Forgotten Space (2010) as a touchstone by which to extend her ship metaphor. The ocean acts as the literal and metaphorical space for thinking about a modernity and globalization which, Sharpe argues, cannot be understood without centering the effects of transatlantic chattel slavery. The ship operates in the ocean backdrop as a space where individuals undergo a negative transformation from people to cargo, subject to object. She also introduces her concept of the “Trans*Atlantic” as “that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black Atlantic but also in excess of its currents….to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies” (30). Her play with language is purposeful as she works to reimagine the limits, boundaries, and expectations inherent within language and explore how it can have radical, transformative potential for those occupying that unthought space. Wake work then functions to theorize “the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness” (33).  This necessitates reexamining the commonly used disciplinary approaches for working with the archives of slavery and beyond. How does one look at such an archive ethically? When faced with the ongoing disasters of police brutality, various refugee crises, and natural disasters, how do we look without commodifying that pain for our own consumption? Sharpe interrogates the efficacy of memorials for such tragedies and their potential to do wake work. While monuments may be dedicated to those affected by disasters both natural and manufactured, their essence often relegates their subjects squarely to the past. In doing so, the ongoing effects of such events become obscured. These monuments function as commemoration and reparation without needing to contend with the structural inequalities and injustice inherent in their construction.

Grappling with such systemic injustice first necessitates being able to recognize and acknowledge how they may manifest in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 3, “The Hold”, Sharpe traces the genealogies of stop-and-frisk police practice, family detention centers, and the school-to-prison pipeline back to the hold of the slave ship. Again, she emphasizes the role of language in shaping reality as “[the] first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard” (70). These violences haunt the lives of Black people living in the diaspora from birth. Partus sequitur ventrem, the slave code that mandated that the condition of slavery passes from mother to child, propagates into the present; Black birth becomes Black death, birthed in the shadow of the slave ship. We must conceive of blackness as “a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (76). While this deterioration of language and meaning can be weaponized against Black subjects to render them less than human, it may also open the space for imagining new potentials. 

Chapter 4, “The Weather”, explores some of those potentialities and offers alternative methods for pushing back against the anti-Black structures that shape Black lives today. Sharpe conceptualizes “the weather” as “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (104). Despite such an overwhelmingly negative environment, Sharpe does not resort to pessimism. Rather she notes how surviving in such a hostile environment calls for improvisation and adaptability to resist the push towards premature death. Sharpe calls us to “aspirate” those figures occupying forgotten spaces, to breathe life into them by remembering their names and giving voice to their experiences. Through this practice, we may exercise a form of care for them. Care and remembrance become radical acts in the wake when these experiences of subjection and dehumanization often pass unacknowledged. She also offers Black annotation and redaction as techniques that can be used when approaching archives. She notes that “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures” (114). Sharpe implores us to look upon archives as actively working on the behalf of those forgotten voices. That is not to say we speculate wildly to fill in all the gaps of the archive, but rather that we try to listen for the silences and let them speak for themselves when supported by the proper context, unencumbered by the pre-scripted narratives of the story of slavery and its afterlives.

Sharpe poetically shifts between the personal and the political, the local and the transnational, to demonstrate how arbitrary those divisions truly are. She asks us to look at these texts and archives as extensions of the people that comprise them, imploring us to engage archives with an ethic of care and empathy. Through this, she asks us to never surrender to the wake’s powerful current.

Works Cited

Sharpe, Christina E. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.

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