Christina Elizabeth Sharpe
Born1965[1]
OccupationProfessor
Academic background
Education

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.[2]

Education

Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child.[3] She received a bachelor's degree in English and Africana studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, having studied abroad at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.[4][5] She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head.[4]

Career and research

Her academic research focuses on Black visual studies, Black queer studies, and mid-nineteenth century to contemporary African-American Literature and Culture.[6]

Employment

Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smiths Colleges from 1996 to 1998.[4] From 1998 until 2018 she held various positions at Tufts University.[7][8][9] Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017.[4]She was the first Black woman to be awarded tenure in the English department at Tufts.[10]

At York University since 2018, she is currently a professor in the department of humanities in the Black Canadian Studies certificate program.[11]

She is the author of the books In the Wake: On Blackness and Being[12] and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects.[13] Her forthcoming publications include a critical introduction to Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010) as well as a monograph: Black. Still. Life.[11]

Monstrous Intimacies (2010)

In Monstrous Intimacies, Christina Sharpe concerns herself with these sexual-racial economies and the "monstrous intimacies" that percolate within, which she describes as "a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous" (3). Sharpe's articulation is contingent upon an oppositional knowledge that holds in tension freedom and subjection, love and hate; indulging in a "diasporic study" that attempts a "complex articulation" of the sexual economies of slavery to denote how power is constructed at the site of the interpersonal and the intimate. Foregrounding Douglass' primal scene as a scene of subjectivation and objectivation and, later, locating the primality in James Henry Hammond's letters and, later still, Jones' text, Sharpe provides an account of its "psychic and material reach" and its subsequent (re)performances of a double/dubbed birth within sites of monstrous intimacies — the blood-stained gate and the Door.

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)

Her second book, In the Wake on Blackness and Being, was published in 2016 by Duke University Press, whose website offers this overview:

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.[14]

Awards

Works (selection)

  • Ordinary Notes. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. [19][20][21][22][23]
  • In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. [24]
  • Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.

References

  1. ↑ Wortham, Jenna (2023-04-26). "The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-04-26.
  2. ↑ "Christina Sharpe papers (Ms.2018.015) at Brown University Library". Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. Archived from the original on 2021-04-13. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  3. ↑ Messer, Miwa (2023-04-29). "Poured Over Double Shot: Ava Chin and Christina Sharpe". B&N Reads. Retrieved 2023-11-16.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Biographical/Historical Note: Christina Sharpe papers (Ms.2018.015) at Brown University Library". Rhode Island Archival and Manuscript Collections Online. Archived from the original on 2021-04-13. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  5. ↑ Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. "The Work of Re-Membering: Reading Gertrude Stein, Gayl Jones, Julie Dash, Cherrie Moraga, and Bessie Head." Order No. 9927415, Cornell University, 1999.
  6. ↑ "Christina Sharpe - Faculty of Community Services - Ryerson University". www.ryerson.ca. Retrieved March 28, 2019.
  7. ↑ "Christina Sharpe". The Conversation. Retrieved July 10, 2020.
  8. ↑ "Christina Sharpe CV" (PDF). Retrieved July 10, 2020.
  9. ↑ Kansara, Anar (May 21, 2018). "Six professors of humanities, social sciences to leave Tufts this year". The Tufts Daily. Archived from the original on 2018-07-19. Retrieved April 13, 2021.
  10. ↑ Wortham, Jenna (2023-04-26). "The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  11. 1 2 "Christina Sharpe, leading scholar in Black Diaspora Studies, joins Black Studies program at York University | Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies". bcs.huma.laps.yorku.ca. Retrieved October 25, 2018.
  12. ↑ Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth (November 14, 2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822362838. OCLC 940520601.
  13. ↑ Sharpe, Christina (2010). Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822345916. OCLC 574955806.
  14. ↑ Sharpe, Christina (2016). In the Wake on Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.
  15. ↑ "In the Wake on Blackness and Being". Duke University Press. 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-07-11.
  16. ↑ Thien, Madeleine (November 26, 2016). "Best books of 2016 – part one". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved April 13, 2021. The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke), on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living.
  17. ↑ Martineau, Jarrett (December 15, 2016). "The Best Books of 2016". The Walrus. Archived from the original on 2016-12-16. Retrieved April 13, 2021. Christina Sharpe's searing and brilliant interrogation of Black life In the Wake
  18. ↑ Nicole Thompson, "Kai Thomas wins Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for debut novel". Toronto Star, November 21, 2023.
  19. ↑ "The Woman Shaping a Generation of Black Thought". .nytimes.
  20. ↑ Cardwell, Erica N. (2023-07-04). "Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes". The Brooklyn Rail. Retrieved 2023-10-21.
  21. ↑ "Christina Sharpe reflects on the complexities of Black life through a new literary form". CBC.
  22. ↑ Muyumba, Walton. "In 'Ordinary Notes,' Christina Sharpe reflects on a Black freedom grounded in beauty and possibility despite white supremacist violence and degradation - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved 2023-10-21.
  23. ↑ "ordinary-notes-christina-sharpe". nytimes.
  24. ↑ "Everything Comes Back to Christina Sharpe's In The Wake". Harper's BAZAAR. 2023-02-23. Retrieved 2023-10-21.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.