Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts 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 this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake”-the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness-Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Gratitude & indebtedness throughout the text, but particularly in the final essay “Debts & lessons” – citing intimates as well as literary & artistic heroes.What emerges in the disruption of quotidian pattern & routines? – on an individual & societal scale?, and in interpersonal relationships with family, neighbors, strangers?.The felt effects of systemic inequalities in everyday life – race, class, gender – & the ways they’re amplified in crises.Time, love & mortality (just a few minor themes!) – what constitutes a life? how do we organize our time mindfully & to what end?.The work of art & artists in relation to “necessity” & politics.“Disaster demanded a new dawn” (11) – imagining post-pandemic life as a return to normalcy vs.Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group. If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes.

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