Ordinary Notes

Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes is a dazzlingly inventive and powerful exploration of Black life, art, language, beauty and memory. Its more than three hundred notes collect into startling, rigorously constructed, beautiful layers, ranging across history, photography and literature to attend to everyday Black existence. Sharpe’s consideration of Black life’s ordinary-extraordinary dimensions shape-shifts through her mother’s aesthetic of beauty as a method, gathers entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable Blackness, and probes sites of memory and memorials.
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge from the ruins, forging a new literary form as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces. The result is a multiverse of immense care, feeling and study.

Author Biography

Christina Sharpe is an American writer and academic of literature and Black studies. She is currently a Professor in the department of humanities at York University, Canada, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Ryerson University. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)