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. 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 the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. 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 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. 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 the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. 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.

A powerful reframing of the study of Black art and the historical and contemporary status of Black lives Perceptual Drift offers a new interpretive model drawing on four key works of Black art in the Cleveland Museum of Art's collection. In its chapters, leading Black scholars from multiple disciplines deploy materialist approaches to challenge the limits of canonic art history, rooted as it is in social and racial inequities. The opening essay by Key Jo Lee introduces the concept of "perceptual drift": a means of exploring the matter of Blackness, or Blackness as matter in art and scholarship. Christina Sharpe examines Rho I (1977) by Jack Whitten; Lee explores Lorna Simpson's Cure/Heal (1992); Robin Coste Lewis analyzes Ellen Gallagher's Bouffant Pride (2003); and Erica Moiah James considers Simone Leigh's Las Meninas (2019). This approach seeks to transform how art history is written, introduce readers to complex objects and theoretical frameworks, illuminate meanings and untold histories, and simultaneously celebrate and open new entry points into Black art. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art

Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand’s poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand’s ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand’s diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand’s poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which “The street was empty/with all of us standing there.� No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is “the wars’ last and late night witness,� her job is not to soothe but to “revise and revise this bristling list/hourly.� Ossuaries’ futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds—past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand’s ongoing body of thought—trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.

An immense achievement, comprising a decades-long career - new and collected poetry from one of Canada's most honoured and significant poets Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand's poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand's ongoing labours of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular "Nomenclature for the Time Being," in which Dionne Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand's poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems, features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which "The street was empty/with all of us standing there." No Language Is Neutral connects language, coloniality, and sexuality. Land to Light On explores intimacies and disaffections with nationality and the nation-state, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars' last and late night witness," her job not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly." Ossuaries' futurist speaker rounds out the collection, and threads multiple temporal worlds - past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand's ongoing body of thought - trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.

New commissioned work by an important American contemporary artist using a multidisciplinary approach to examine issues of race and identity Produced for the Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media by the multidisciplinary artist Martine Syms (b. 1988), Neural Swamp is an immersive video installation that builds upon Syms's interest in the proliferation, circulation, and consumption of images, as well as her continued research into machine systems that erase or make invisible Black bodies, voices, and narratives. The publication documents this new work, offering in-depth analysis and a visual essay that reflects the specific approach to images and text characterizing Syms's practice. Neural Swamp's multichannel presentation reveals its characters through their reading of a continually changing script, the variations determined by a text-generating model. Through these dynamic interactions, along with the installation's physical elements, Syms creates a kaleidoscopic view of the world and our complex relationship with one another and with technology. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Exhibition Schedule: Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (November 5, 2021-March 27, 2022) Philadelphia Museum of Art (May 14-October 30, 2022)

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those "monstrous intimacies" and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass's narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams's declaration of freedom in "Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond," as well as the "generational genital fantasies" depicted in Gayl Jones's novel "Corregidora" with a firsthand account of such "monstrous intimacies" in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head's novel "Maru"--about race, power, and liberation in Botswana--in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the "Hottentot Venus" in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien's film "The Attendant," Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker's black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.

Not so long ago, many spoke of a 'post-racial' era, claiming that advances made by people of colour showed that racial divisions were becoming a thing of the past. But the hollowness of such claims has been exposed by the rise of Trump and Brexit, both of which have revealed deep seated white resentment, and have been attended by a resurgence in hate crime and overt racial hatred on both sides of the Atlantic. At a time when progress towards equality is not only stalling, but being actively reversed, how should anti-racist scholars respond? This collection carries on James Baldwin's legacy of bearing witness to racial violence in its many forms. Its authors address how we got to this particular moment, arguing that it can only be truly understood by placing it within the wider historical and structural contexts that normalise racism and white supremacy. Its chapters engage with a wide range of contemporary issues and debates, from the whiteness of the recent women's marches, to anti-racist education, to the question of Black resistance and intersectionality. Mapping out the problems we face, and the solutions we need, the book considers how anti-racist scholarship and activism can overcome the setbacks posed by the resurgence of white supremacy.

Not so long ago, many spoke of a 'post-racial' era, claiming that advances made by people of colour showed that racial divisions were becoming a thing of the past. But the hollowness of such claims has been exposed by the rise of Trump and Brexit, both of which have revealed deep seated white resentment, and have been attended by a resurgence in hate crime and overt racial hatred on both sides of the Atlantic. At a time when progress towards equality is not only stalling, but being actively reversed, how should anti-racist scholars respond? This collection carries on James Baldwin's legacy of bearing witness to racial violence in its many forms. Its authors address how we got to this particular moment, arguing that it can only be truly understood by placing it within the wider historical and structural contexts that normalise racism and white supremacy. Its chapters engage with a wide range of contemporary issues and debates, from the whiteness of the recent women's marches, to anti-racist education, to the question of Black resistance and intersectionality. Mapping out the problems we face, and the solutions we need, the book considers how anti-racist scholarship and activism can overcome the setbacks posed by the resurgence of white supremacy.

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those "monstrous intimacies" and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass's narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester with Essie Mae Washington-Williams's declaration of freedom in "Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond," as well as the "generational genital fantasies" depicted in Gayl Jones's novel "Corregidora" with a firsthand account of such "monstrous intimacies" in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slaveholder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head's novel "Maru"--about race, power, and liberation in Botswana--in light of the history of the KhoiSan woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the "Hottentot Venus" in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien's film "The Attendant," Sharpe takes up issues of representation, slavery, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of Kara Walker's black silhouettes, and the critiques leveled against both the silhouettes and the artist.