THEORY

THE WAKE OF SLAVERY 

 “Living as I have argued we do in the wake of slavery, in spaces where we were never meant to survive, or have been punished for surviving and daring to claim or make spaces of something like freedom, we yet reimagine and transform spaces for and practices of an ethics of care (as in repair, maintenance, attention), an ethics of seeing, and of being in the wake as consciousness; as a way of remembering and observance that started with the door of no return, continued in the hold of the ship and on the shore” (Sharpe 2016, pp. 130-1).

WAKE WORK

“I’ve been thinking of this gathering, this collecting and reading toward a new analytic, as the wake and wake work, and I am interested in plotting, mapping, and collecting the archives of the everyday Black immanent and imminent death, and in tracking the ways we resist, rupture, and disrupt that immanence and imminence aesthetically and materially.” (Sharpe 2016, 13)

MONSTROUS INTIMACIES

 “…a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires, and positions produced, reproduced, circulated and transmitted, that is breathed in the air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous” (Sharpe 2010).