04: Art Historian Samantha Noël on In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

In light of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd, one book that brings me solace as I think about the inexplicable prevalence of premature Black death and the enduring resolve of Black life is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This heartfelt yet powerful text offers a close look at the “wake” in all of its iterations as it has manifested in the lives of Black people in the Americas across time and space. For Sharpe, to be in the wake is to continuously be aware of slavery’s unfolding presence in the lives of Black people, beginning not only with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but also staying awake to keep watch with the dead during wakes, and, more importantly, developing particular kinds of enduring consciousness (as in being woke) as forms of resistance.

Sharpe’s enquiry into this study begins on a personal level as she discusses the loss of loved ones in her family, but then connects them to the loss of other Black lives that succumb to the afterlives of slavery -- or the term systemic racism that is widely used in popular culture these days. These afterlives of slavery consist of everything from incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, to the crises of black maternal health and inequities in living wages. Throughout the book, Sharpe examines visual, literary and quotidian representations of Black life that exalt the primacy of being in the wake which ultimately reminds us of the enduring spirit of Black life.

– Samantha Noël

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal. Noël’s current book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021), examines black modernism in the early twentieth century, particularly how tropicality functioned as a unifying element in African Diasporic art and performance.