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kristinlorette's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
bookbuyingwithkatie's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
catfishmaggie's review
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
raulbime's review
5.0
In Note 242, Christina Sharpe gives the aim of these notes:"I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under brutal regimes."
This book is made up of notes, which are observations and remembrances and imaginings of alternative possibilities and realities by the writer. Chistina Sharpe is fastidious and the notes are succinct. They chronicle the devastations racism and anti-Blackness cause; recall moments of joy and tenderness shared with loved ones; critique art and literature. This was really extraordinary, and I’m marvelling at the ways in which she melds the quotidian and personal and political and artistic in merging threads so that what would have been otherwise very ordinary notes, as the title suggests, turns into an extraordinary account and chronicle.
Some of my favourite notes below.
“Stories in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong. Who writes, how one writes–as in from what subject position–and what one writes matters. It matters because while films, novels, plays, and poems are works of imagination and are not collapsible into the narrowly political, all work arises out of particular spaces/places/needs/and times, all works are produced and received within a context, all works are political. The how, who, when, and why of what stories are published and become bestsellers and what films are made and circulated and go on to win prizes matters because they are, to quote the Nigerian novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ”really dependent on power.” Certainly, the power of publishing, financing, and distribution, but also of course representational power, the power of stories to shape realities–to shape how we see each other and ourselves.” Note 58
“Art is argument. Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such. It is a useful fiction, but it is only a fiction, to insist that art lies beyond critique. And intention aside, among the things that art may do is produce and reproduce pain; art can be cruel interpretation or malevolent intervention.” Note 79
“But elegance is not the province of leisure or the domain of wealth; it is not fashion; it is the persistence of style.” Note 124
“Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.” Note 234
This book is made up of notes, which are observations and remembrances and imaginings of alternative possibilities and realities by the writer. Chistina Sharpe is fastidious and the notes are succinct. They chronicle the devastations racism and anti-Blackness cause; recall moments of joy and tenderness shared with loved ones; critique art and literature. This was really extraordinary, and I’m marvelling at the ways in which she melds the quotidian and personal and political and artistic in merging threads so that what would have been otherwise very ordinary notes, as the title suggests, turns into an extraordinary account and chronicle.
Some of my favourite notes below.
“Stories in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong. Who writes, how one writes–as in from what subject position–and what one writes matters. It matters because while films, novels, plays, and poems are works of imagination and are not collapsible into the narrowly political, all work arises out of particular spaces/places/needs/and times, all works are produced and received within a context, all works are political. The how, who, when, and why of what stories are published and become bestsellers and what films are made and circulated and go on to win prizes matters because they are, to quote the Nigerian novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, ”really dependent on power.” Certainly, the power of publishing, financing, and distribution, but also of course representational power, the power of stories to shape realities–to shape how we see each other and ourselves.” Note 58
“Art is argument. Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such. It is a useful fiction, but it is only a fiction, to insist that art lies beyond critique. And intention aside, among the things that art may do is produce and reproduce pain; art can be cruel interpretation or malevolent intervention.” Note 79
“But elegance is not the province of leisure or the domain of wealth; it is not fashion; it is the persistence of style.” Note 124
“Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.” Note 234
colindac's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
"I was strangling words before they even left my throat." Brilliant collection of memories, artifacts, observations on Black life.