Ordinary Notes Christina Sharpe by Christina Sharpe 9780374604486, 9781039000599, 0374604487, 1039000592 instant download after payment.

WINNER OF THE 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . & yet always finds a way to beauty & possibility" (Saidiya Hartman). A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss & the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities & possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes & tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, & literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life. 

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author’s mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. “I learned to see in my mother’s house,” writes Sharpe. “I learned how not to see in my mother’s house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.” Using these gifts & other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices & experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” & rigorously examines sites of memory & memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

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Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness & Being (Duke U. Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian & the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 & a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.