Christina Sharpe in Conversation with John Keene

In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe initiates and describes a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather." In doing so she shows how the sign of the slave ship and its wake mark and haunt 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 renders Black life precarious and produces premature Black death as normative and also generates multiple sites and modes of Black resistance.