Critically acclaimed author of In the Wake, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman). A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and 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 and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and 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 and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and 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,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces. 4-color art throughout
Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora with a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African–born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker’s black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.
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. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.
In 1980, an aviation pioneer and millionaire named Trevor Schalk found the key to immortality. His psychiatrist and hypnotherapist, Dr. Christopher Peck, completed the most extensive post-hypnotic command in history. After the 25th birthday of Schalk's next life, whoever or wherever that was, this life would begin to come back to him. Unfortunately for Schalk, on the night he'd secured his immortality, Trevor Schalk was murdered. The police never even arrested a suspect. Now, in 2005, Timothy Gilbraight is starting to have weird dreams. Dreams in which he's an eccentric millionaire, hated by everyone around him. Dreams in which he's being murdered, but he can't tell by whom. But is Trevor Schalk really back? That's what skeptic private investigator Amy Devlin has to find out and quickly -- Devlin isn't the only one looking for proof and if the person who killed Trevor Schalk 25 years ago is convinced that Gilbraight is the real deal, they're not going to hesitate to kill again.
Kylie Claremont wants answers. She was the victim of a brutal experiment that caused her to develop telekinetic abilities. The doctors at the research facility disappeared without a trace and she was left with some strange abilities and a lot of questions. Determined not to let the past destroy her, she built a successful career as a web developer and found a place on the Psy Guild Council. Even though the guild members look down on her for being a lab created psy, she’s working hard to bring changes to the closed-minded group. The position she’s offered as a liaison between Shifters United and the Psy Guild will give her the chance to find the elusive research company that disappeared after experimenting on her and bring them to justice. The only thing standing in her way is an arrogant coyote shifter who is convinced that Kylie is a threat to shifters and shouldn’t be allowed to be a part of Shifters United. She never expected to fall for the gruff, mistrustful man but he has a sweet side that takes her by surprise. Coyote shifter Trevor Ryland will never trust the psy. Still, he knows the time has come to strengthen the tentative alliance between shifters and psy. He fully intends to ignore his attraction to the beautiful psy liaison, but he’d never forgive himself if something happened to her. His plan to protect her from afar is wrecked when they’re forced to work together. Kylie could be his mate but he can’t let that happen. Before he can stop himself, he vows to protect her by any means necessary. A more serious vow than he intended to give. The struggle to deny his need for the one woman with the power to destroy him gets harder every day. During their search for the traveling research group that turns unsuspecting subjects into psy, Trevor and Kylie uncover a web of greed and deceit. Traitors want to silence them and opportunists want to capture and exploit everyone with strange abilities. Trevor and Kylie will have to work fast and fight hard to stop the deranged research group CEO’s latest plans or psy and shifters everywhere will suffer.
From the co-writers of AVALON CHRONICLES and PLAY BALL and the artist of WASTELAND! Amy Devlin might not be a licensed Private Investigator but that hasn't stopped her from playing one on the internet! But the case she's about to find herself on is no game. Trevor Schalk was an eccentric millionaire obsessed with reincarnation right up to his murder in 1980. Now Tim Gilbraight is having weird dreams in which he's a bitter, rich man--despised by everyone around him. It's up to Devlin to determine if Schalk is a past life or a past lie.
This book offers an overview of the material expressions of Caribbean religious expressions, including those that have been imported through the vehicle of colonialism, and which subsequently changed and adapted within the Caribbean Islands and those religious expressions which developed through the contact of African, indigenous and imported world views. This book takes a multi-disciplinary perspective, drawing from subjects as diverse as archaeology, religious studies, history, human geography and anthropology. It introduces current topical debates around the role of colonialism and religion in the Caribbean, and also considers theoretical approaches to the study of Caribbean religions set within a wider global context. This approach introduces the reader to a number of important and topical concepts around the wider study of Caribbean religions, and illuminates the complex cultural history and interplay of these religions in the Caribbean Islands. Richly illustrated and drawing upon a range of different cultural approaches, it offers new and challenging perspectives on the development and cultural history of Caribbean spiritual and religious expression through the lens of the material world. The book is for anyone interested in the Caribbean as a region and the role of religious behaviour in human society. Students of religions, archaeology and anthropology will find a number of thought-provoking and important case studies which relate complex theories to real-world case studies. Any profits from this book will be donated to UNICEF Eastern Caribbean projects supporting vulnerable children in the region (https://www.unicef.org/easterncaribbean/).
This open-access book investigates Francophone Caribbean literature by exploring and analyzing French seventeenth-century travel writings. The book argues for a literary re-examination of the representation of the early colonial Caribbean by proposing theoretical linkages to contemporary Caribbean theories of creolization and archipelagic thinking. Using Édouard Glissant’s notion of points of entanglement, Christina Kullberg claims that the historical, social, and political messiness of the Caribbean seventeenth century make for complex representations and expressions, generating textual instability despite the travelers’ apparent desires to domesticate the islands. Taking a synoptic approach to travel narratives in French from 1620 up to the publication of Labat’s Nouveau voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique in 1722, Kullberg examines textual instances where the islands and the peoples of this period disrupt and unsettle dominant French narratives and enter productively into the construction of knowledge and the representations of the region. Kullberg’s contribution is to read French early modern travels in situ as shaped by the archipelagic geography, its history and social formations in order to interrogate both the construction and the limitations of discourses of power.
This monograph examines the most prestigious political paintings created in Britain during the High Baroque age. It investigates a period characterized by numerous social, political, and religious crises, in the years between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660) and the death of the first British monarch from the House of Hanover (1727). On the basis of hitherto unpublished documents, the book elucidates the creation and reception of nine major commissions that involved the court, private aristocratic patrons, and/or civic institutions. The ground-breaking new interpretations of these works focus on strategies of conflict resolution, the creation of shared cultural memories, processes of cultural translation, the performative context of the murals and the interaction of painted images and architectural spaces.
He sent for a nanny… and ended up with a mail-order bride. Marshal Beau Garrett penned a desperate ad for a nanny to wrangle the five unruly children he inherited. So why is this society miss at his jail claiming to be his betrothed? Penelope Parker thought the mail-order bride ad was her salvation when she fled the city and an arranged marriage. Meddling matchmakers may be to blame for the mix-up, but no matter, she won’t go back. With one week to change Beau’s mind, she’ll just hike up her muddied skirts, tame the children and prove to her reluctant groom he needs a wife.
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