Ordinary Notes

November 1, 2022

Sharpe follows up In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, a Guardian best-booked title of 2016, with a compendium of 248 notes plumbing the past, the present, and future possibilities, both public and personal, to represent contemporary Black life. While In the Wake was published by an academic press, this new book comes from a commercial press and should win Sharpe more readers. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from February 13, 2023
Sharpe (In the Wake), a Black studies professor at York University, Toronto, lays bare the brutality of anti-Black racism through 248 brief “notes” on history, art, and her personal life in this poignant and genre-defying triumph. Recounting a visit to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Sharpe contends that its decision to feature statues only of enslaved children instead of adults suggests that the curators thought generating empathy for the enslaved children “was an easier task than seeing all Black people, everywhere/anywhere, as human.” Her wide-ranging analysis is penetrating, as when she links a journalist’s comments calling a neo-Nazi a “good father,” Francis Galton’s dubious honorific as the “father” of eugenics, and the remarks of a sheriff who said the 2021 Atlanta mass shooter who targeted Asian women had “a really bad day,” arguing that white supremacists are “extended the grammar of the human” often denied to people of color. Throughout, Sharpe returns to the supportive influence of her mother, who encouraged her “to build a life that was nourishing and Black” and instituted a family tradition of reciting excerpts from Black authors over tea, making Sharpe feel “accomplished and loved.” The fragmentary dispatches are rich with suggestion and insight, generating meaning through juxtaposition and benefiting from Sharpe’s pointed prose. Moving and profound, this is not to be missed. Photos.

March 1, 2023

In this collection of 248 notes, Sharpe (Black studies, York Univ.; In the Wake: On Blackness and Being) reflects on her life and experiences as a Black woman. The notes range in length from a sentence to several pages and give readers the feeling of reading from a personal journal. They encompass a variety of topics, including growing up as one of the only Black children in school; the imperfection of memory; the nature of grief and the challenge of memorials; the relativity of time; the brutality of anti-Black racism; and the systemic nature of whiteness. Sharpe integrates recent events into her reflections, such as the many murders of Black men and women by police in the U.S., and the Charleston murders and the response to them by politicians and law enforcement officials. Additionally, Sharpe engages with multimedia to explore these topics and muses on photography, meaningful books, quotations, and observations from trips to museums and memorials. She integrates heartfelt personal anecdotes; stories about her family members, particularly her mother and grandmother; and lessons that she has learned from her relatives about seeing beauty in its many dimensions. VERDICT A resonant collection of stories and reflections.--Rebekah Kati

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2023
A potent series of "notes" paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America. Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe--the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being--writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author's original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends ("preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness"). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe's critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama's choice to sing "Amazing Grace" at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves between an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author's mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes' work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. "Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle...feels appropriate to the weight of this history," writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe's artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally. An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.

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