Christina Elizabeth Sharpe (born 1965) is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.
[2] Christina Sharpe is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and in 2024 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.
"Wake work" calls for insurgent engagement with the ways that Black life and death are figured by anti-Blackness, into practices of survival, remembrance, and resistance in African culture.
Throughout the book, Sharpe investigates how the legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and racial violence continue to be present in Black communities and uses critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to analyse these times.
[12] Her work is recognized for creative techniques that lend to an understanding of Black living in a world defined by historical enslavement and contemporary systematic racism.
The publishers write of it: {{quote|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.
[22][failed verification] Her 2016 work, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, received similar feedback, garnering acclaim for its blend of personal narrative with a combination of historical and theoretical analysis.
The Chicago Review of Books mentioned that while the versatile form supports the ambitious range of subjects, the kaleidoscopic structure might make it difficult for readers looking for a traditional narrative arc.