#wakework

WAKE WORK: “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this epistemology with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.” Christina Sharpe uses the ‘wake,’ in all it’s definitions to explore the legacies of slavery and how they manifest. Wake wake offers a way forward, a way to dismantle the signifiers of race (Stuart Hall) so we can create a new analytic to imagine new ways to live as legacies of slavery. My copy tells it’s own story I guess - some pages underlined with definitions and reminders and exclamation points. Other pages I am silent - depending on my whereabouts I’m either swallowing tears or allowing them to fall. In essence this book broke and mended me. Or maybe it answered questions that I didn’t know I should be asking. Either way, it spoke to my Blackness, me as a legacy of slavery - in my womanhood, motherhood, sexuality and offered the creative in me a way forward. But. How does wake work survive? As a writer how does my wake work survive publication and marketing strategies in British publishing? It’s a question (and a book) I’ll refer to often. #phdjourney #phd #phdlife #phdlife #blackbritish #blackbritishhistory #blackbritishculture #blackbritishwomen #christinasharpe #wakework https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRHkvhqAqG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

The Artist and His Mother, Arshile Gorky

(2,3) Moten, Fred. Black and Blur

I would further argue that writing fiction itself can be a useful exercise. Some of us turn to fiction writing to create worlds resembling the ones we know, but which contain events that never happened. Fiction allows for the “what if,” the bringing together of invented characters in realms that we may know well, and then watching what happens. Unlike ethnography, there is no need to stay true to the people that one meets in the field. Liberalities can be taken with place and setting as well.

“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 antiblackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as "normal." 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.“