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Christina Elizabeth Sharpe | |
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| Born | 1965 [1] |
| Occupation | Professor |
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Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. [2] 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. [3]
Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child. [4] 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. [5] [6] She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head. [5]
Her academic research focuses on Black visual studies, Black queer studies, and mid-nineteenth century to contemporary African-American Literature and Culture. [7]
Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smiths Colleges from 1996 to 1998. [5] From 1998 until 2018 she held various positions at Tufts University. [8] [9] [10] Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017. [5] She was the first Black woman to be awarded tenure in the English department at Tufts. [11]
At York University since 2018, she is currently a professor in the department of humanities in the Black Canadian Studies certificate program. [12]
She is the author of the books In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, [13] Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. [14] and Ordinary Notes. She authored a critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010). Her forthcoming publications include a monograph: Black. Still. Life. [12]
In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe concerns herself with these 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" (3). 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.
Her second book, In the Wake on Blackness and Being, was published in 2016 by Duke University Press, whose website offers this overview:
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 ship,' 'the hold,' and 'the weather,' Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. 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. [15]
Durham County is a county located in the U.S. state of North Carolina. As of the 2020 census, the population was 324,833, making it the sixth-most populous county in North Carolina. Its county seat is Durham, which is the only incorporated municipality predominantly in the county, though very small portions of cities and towns mostly in neighboring counties also extend into Durham County. The central and southern parts of Durham County are highly urban, consisting of the city as well as several unincorporated suburbs. Southeastern Durham County is dominated by the Research Triangle Park, most of which is in Durham County. The northern third of Durham County is rural in nature.
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the county seat of Durham County. Small portions of the city limits extend into Orange County and Wake County. With a population of 283,506 in the 2020 census, Durham is the fourth-most populous city in North Carolina and the 71st-most populous city in the United States. The city is located in the east-central part of the Piedmont region along the Eno River. Durham is the core of the four-county Durham–Chapel Hill metropolitan area, which had an estimated population of 608,879 in 2023. The Office of Management and Budget also includes Durham as a part of the Raleigh-Durham-Cary combined statistical area, commonly known as the Research Triangle, which had an estimated population of 2,368,947 in 2023.
The Research Triangle, or simply The Triangle, are both common nicknames for a metropolitan area in the Piedmont region of the U.S. state of North Carolina. Anchored by the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill, the region is home to three major research universities: North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, respectively. The "Triangle" name originated in the 1950s with the creation of Research Triangle Park located between the three anchor cities, which is the largest research park in the United States and home to numerous high tech companies.
Lisa Lowe is Samuel Knight Professor of American Studies at Yale University, and an affiliate faculty in the programs in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to Yale, she taught at the University of California, San Diego, and Tufts University. She began as a scholar of French and comparative literature, and since then her work has focused on the cultural politics of colonialism, immigration, and globalization. She is known especially for scholarship on French, British, and United States colonialisms, Asian migration and Asian American studies, race and liberalism, and comparative empires.
Leslie Brown was an American historian.
Tiya Alicia Miles is an American historian. She is Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is a public historian, academic historian, and creative writer whose work explores the intersections of African American, Native American and women's histories. Her research includes African American and Native American interrelated and comparative histories ; Black, Native, and U.S. women's histories; and African American and Native American women's literature. She was a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
NC Mutual was an American life insurance company located in downtown Durham, North Carolina and one of the most influential African-American businesses in United States history. Founded in 1898 by local black social leaders, its business increased from less than a thousand dollars in income in 1899 to a quarter of a million dollars in 1910. The company specialized in "industrial insurance," which was basically burial insurance. The company hired salesmen whose main job was to collect small payments to cover the insured person for the next week. If the person died while insured, the company immediately paid benefits of about 100 dollars. This covered the cost of a suitable funeral, which was a high prestige item in the black community. It began operations in the new tobacco manufacturing city of Durham, North Carolina, and moved north into Virginia and Maryland, then to major northern black urban centers, and then to the rest of the urban South.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Jenna Wortham is an American journalist. They work as a culture writer for The New York Times Magazine and co-host The New York Times podcast Still Processing with Wesley Morris. In 2020, with Kimberly Drew, Wortham published Black Futures, an anthology of Black art, writing and other creative work.
Kimberly Drew is an American art influencer and writer. She is best known as the former social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her use of the social media handle MuseumMammy. Drew released her first book, This Is What I Know About Art in June 2020, as part of a children series from Penguin, and published an anthology titled Black Futures with New York Times staff writer Jenna Wortham in December 2020.
Afro-pessimism is a critical framework that describes the ongoing effects of racism, colonialism, and historical processes of enslavement in the United States, including the transatlantic slave trade and their impact on structural conditions as well as the personal, subjective, and lived experience and embodied reality of African Americans; it is particularly applicable to U.S. contexts.
Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Beacon, New York, United States. Dyson describes the themes of her work as "architecture, infrastructure, environmental justice, and abstract drawing." Her work is informed by her own theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how spatial networks—paths, throughways, water, architecture, and geographies—are composed by Black bodies as a means of exploring potential networks for Black liberation. She is represented by Pace Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery.
C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know".
Jessamyn Stanley is an American yoga teacher and body positivity advocate and writer. She gained recognition through her Instagram posts showing her doing yoga as a "plus-size woman of color," who self-identifies as a "fat femme" and "queer femme." She is the author of the books Every Body Yoga: Let Go of Fear, Get On the Mat, Love Your Body and Yoke: My Yoga of Self Acceptance.
Deborah A. Thomas is an American anthropologist and filmmaker, and is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published books and articles on the history, culture, and politics of Jamaica; and on human rights, sexuality, and globalization in the Caribbean arena. She has co-produced and co-directed two experimental films, and has co-curated a multimedia exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2016, she began a four-year term as editor-in-chief of the journal American Anthropologist. Before pursuing her career as an anthropologist, Thomas performed as a professional dancer with Urban Bush Women, a New York dance company that used art to promote social equity by illuminating the experiences of disenfranchised people.
Kerri K. Greenidge is an American historian and academic. Her book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, a biography of civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter, won the 2020 Mark Lynton History Prize. Her sisters are the playwright Kirsten Greenidge and the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge.
Marcia Chatelain is an American academic who serves as the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (2020), for which she also won the James Beard Award for Writing in 2022. Chatelain was the first black woman to win the latter award.
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Ordinary Notes is a book by Christina Sharpe, published in April 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book is a collection of 248 notes about black life. It was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke), 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.
Christina Sharpe's searing and brilliant interrogation of Black life In the Wake
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