Christina Sharpe’s “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” addresses issues of citizenship, racial violence, and black mortality, meshing her personal experiences surrounding death and “the wake” with a sharp critique of cultural structures, as well as a reimagining of slavery, funeral, and death metaphors. In the wake of so many “ongoing state-sanctioned legal and extralegal murders of Black people,” Sharpe’s argument that black death is a foundational aspect of American citizenship encourages readers to acknowledge the antiblackness embedded in the past, present, and future of American (and by extension, Transatlantic) democracy (7). With the continued and encouraged proliferation of black death in the global diaspora, Sharpe’s study will, hopefully, usher in more woke scholarship that questions pervasive antiblackness.
Articles by Dana Horton
Dana Horton is an Assistant Professor of English at Mercy College. Dr. Horton earned her Ph.D. in English at Northeastern University and her B.A. in English and African-American Studies at Temple University. Dr. Horton’s current book project, 12 Years a Slave-Master: Gender, Genre, and Race in Post-Neo-Slave Narratives, examines representations of black and white female slave-owners in twenty-first century American literature, film, and music. Her areas of specialization include Black Atlantic Literature, Black Women Writers, Slave Narratives, Postcolonial Literature, and Feminist Theory. In her free time, Dr. Horton enjoys playing board games, collecting post office memorabilia, and complaining about the current season of Scandal.