Christina Sharpe's In the Wake is a short book — under two hundred pages — that reorganizes how a great many readers think about the ongoing present of slavery. The wake of the title operates in three registers at once: the disturbance a ship leaves in the water (literally the slave ship's wake), the vigil kept over a corpse (the wake as mourning), and the consciousness Black life maintains in the face of ongoing violence (being awake, being in the wake of what cannot be allowed to be forgotten).
Sharpe's argument is that the conditions of unfreedom slavery established have not ended; they have re-organized themselves under new names, and the structural fact of Black death — police violence, premature mortality differentials, the carceral state — is a continuation, not a failure, of the project that began with the slave ship. The book documents specific deaths and specific lives in the wake, and the precision of the documentation is what makes the argument unfalsifiable.
The chapter that reorganized me on first reading was 'The Hold' — Sharpe's reading of the contemporary detention apparatus (school discipline, immigration detention, the prison, the psychiatric hold) as the structural continuation of the ship's hold. She names what was already obvious in a way that makes the obviousness operational.
Read it in one or two sittings. Then read it again. Duke University Press paperback is the standard.
Editorial commentary
Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) is one of the most analytically ambitious works of contemporary Black studies. The book develops a sustained meditation on the relationship between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the contemporary condition of Black populations in the Americas, organized around the controlling figure of 'the wake.'
Christina Sharpe is professor of humanities and Black studies at York University in Toronto. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) developed the analytical framework of 'the wake' — combining the disturbance left by a ship's passage, the vigil over the dead, and the consequence of an action that continues to operate — as a way of engaging the relationship between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the contemporary condition of Black populations in the Americas. Her subsequent Ordinary Notes (2023) extends the analytical work.
Sharpe's analytical framework draws on Hartman's earlier work on the afterlife of slavery, on the Afro-pessimist tradition's engagement with the position of the slave in post-emancipation legal orders, and on the broader contemporary humanities scholarship on memory, trauma, and historical inheritance. The book applies the framework to specific contemporary cases — the deaths in Hurricane Katrina, the killings of Black children by police, the migration crises across the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.
The book's literary and rhetorical register is distinctive. Sharpe writes in a mode that combines scholarly argumentation with personal memoir, photographic engagement, and close reading of literary texts. The mode is deliberate; the book argues that the analytical work it is doing cannot be conducted in the conventional disciplinary register alone.
The book has been received across multiple disciplinary traditions — Black studies, literary studies, contemporary philosophy, photography theory — and has become one of the central reference points for the broader contemporary humanities engagement with the question of how historical inheritance operates in the present. The book's brevity (under one hundred fifty pages) and analytical density make it suitable for graduate-seminar use and advanced undergraduate engagement.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) is one of the most analytically ambitious works of contemporary Black studies. The book develops a sustained meditation on the relationship between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the contemporary condition of Black populations in the Americas, organized around the controlling figure of 'the wake.'
Christina Sharpe is professor of humanities and Black studies at York University in Toronto. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) developed the analytical framework of 'the wake' — combining the disturbance left by a ship's passage, the vigil over the dead, and the consequence of an action that continues to operate — as a way of engaging the relationship between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the contemporary condition of Black populations in the Americas. Her subsequent Ordinary Notes (2023) extends the analytical work.
Sharpe's analytical framework draws on Hartman's earlier work on the afterlife of slavery, on the Afro-pessimist tradition's engagement with the position of the slave in post-emancipation legal orders, and on the broader contemporary humanities scholarship on memory, trauma, and historical inheritance. The book applies the framework to specific contemporary cases — the deaths in Hurricane Katrina, the killings of Black children by police, the migration crises across the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.
The book's literary and rhetorical register is distinctive. Sharpe writes in a mode that combines scholarly argumentation with personal memoir, photographic engagement, and close reading of literary texts. The mode is deliberate; the book argues that the analytical work it is doing cannot be conducted in the conventional disciplinary register alone.
The book has been received across multiple disciplinary traditions — Black studies, literary studies, contemporary philosophy, photography theory — and has become one of the central reference points for the broader contemporary humanities engagement with the question of how historical inheritance operates in the present. The book's brevity (under one hundred fifty pages) and analytical density make it suitable for graduate-seminar use and advanced undergraduate engagement.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.