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A review by mosso
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Christina Sharpe is a preeminent writer of our time. Few manage to cover this vast a breadth with such incision. In the Wake was instruction in how to read Ordinary Notes, with the former guiding you through iteration of frame, of definition, of the un/making of "Blackness and Being." Ordinary Notes demands this care of reading, of engagement with multiple and woven meaning.
Sharpe throws the archive into sharp relief, examining its absences and its curatorial frame. Who does the archive forgive? She poses the violence of omission of black history and story and individuality ("ditto") as wholly different from and wholly similar to the violent omission of perpetrator and the truncation of historical through line. Sharpe explores beyond this false end, refusing to situate history as historic. In doing so, she oscillates between scale, inextricably linking the archive with the personal, with her mother, with her grandmother. She is building the alternate world which relishes and makes space for the stories of the Black women/authors who formed her.
Sharpe is incredibly well-read, and this fact is omnipresent throughout the work. In some ways, Ordinary Notes reads like a syllabus, as Sharpe is a teacher, guiding the reader to perpetual "further readings." Having read only a few of the seminal works (Lorde, Hartman, Baldwin) listed throughout, I see the way those authors shape the contours of her ontology. I know I have missed much more, and I'm grateful to Sharpe for her continued teaching.
Sharpe throws the archive into sharp relief, examining its absences and its curatorial frame. Who does the archive forgive? She poses the violence of omission of black history and story and individuality ("ditto") as wholly different from and wholly similar to the violent omission of perpetrator and the truncation of historical through line. Sharpe explores beyond this false end, refusing to situate history as historic. In doing so, she oscillates between scale, inextricably linking the archive with the personal, with her mother, with her grandmother. She is building the alternate world which relishes and makes space for the stories of the Black women/authors who formed her.
Sharpe is incredibly well-read, and this fact is omnipresent throughout the work. In some ways, Ordinary Notes reads like a syllabus, as Sharpe is a teacher, guiding the reader to perpetual "further readings." Having read only a few of the seminal works (Lorde, Hartman, Baldwin) listed throughout, I see the way those authors shape the contours of her ontology. I know I have missed much more, and I'm grateful to Sharpe for her continued teaching.