ORDINARY NOTES

379pp., colour illus., paperback, London, 2023

"[Sharpe's] most liberating and poetic experiment yet. Made up of 248 individual notes, it is a deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections on her daily life ... The notes build in momentum and assemble themselves into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty ... If there’s an argument at the center of Ordinary Notes, it is that attentiveness and imagination are powerful restorative agents capable of reconstituting what has been broken down and targeted for obliteration." Jenna Wortham, The New York Times Magazine

“Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements and the violence of antiblackness and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility. With exacting detail, she conveys the heartbreak of the imposed order and the openings that reside in the ordinary and offers a method, a poetics for refusing and exceeding the given, for sustaining life, for breaking the colonial frame, and imagining what might emerge at the end of the known world. Ordinary Notes is an exquisite text. It demands everything of the reader and, in turn, offers us a vocabulary for living.”Saidiya Hartman, author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities, at York University, in Toronto.