Mardi 30 janvier 2024 18h Salle 126 STC1
Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes: Fragmented Untranslatable Blackness
“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations,
over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” (Note 18)
This talk follows from the presentation of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) to map out major directions of African American thought and to delineate the contours, the import, and the limits of what has been labeled Afro-pessimism (Frank B. Wilderson III). Along with Saidiya Hartman (Lose Your Mother, 2006; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 2019), Christina Sharpe, who teaches Black Studies at York University in Toronto, has been hailed as one of the foremost contemporary Black radical cultural critics. To French readers, Ordinary Notes will recall Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux: the 248 notes of various lengths address the intimate—Notes is an ode to her mother—and the cultural, the collective, the current historical moment of #Blacklivesmatter and the legacy of slavery. Pondering what is seen and not seen of Black life in the United States, Sharpe convokes a series of private and public photographs—she critiques La Chambre claire—in this dense mélange of memories, artwork, and academic “notes,” i.e. observations. She calls us to attention.
Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2023 for National Book Awards for Nonfiction. Sharpe has authored two studies, of which Ordinary Notes is a follow up: Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake. On Blackness and Being (2016). She has recently edited a collection of Dionne Brand’s poems and is working on three books: What Could a Vessel Be? (Knopf, Canada, FSG, USA, 2025), Black. Still. Life. (Duke UP, 2025) and To Have Been To the End of the World: 25 Essays on Art.