Please join us at the Churchill House for a lecture by author Christina Sharpe, presented by Brown University’s Department of Modern Culture and Media! The lecture will be held in the George Houston Bass Performing Arts Space, followed by a reception and book signing. This event is free and open to all who RSVP!*
ABOUT CHRISTINA SHARPE
Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (named by the Guardian as one of the best books of 2016), Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, and most recently Ordinary Notes—longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award in Nonfiction. She is currently Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto.
ABOUT ORDINARY NOTES
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION 2023!
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages—sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature—always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. "I learned to see in my mother's house," writes Sharpe. "I learned how not to see in my mother's house… My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She practices an aesthetic of "beauty as a method," collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a "Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness," and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
*Seating is limited, so we kindly ask all guests to RSVP to this event. Please submit your RSVP by February 27th at 10PM EST.