Sharpe, Ordinary Notes
Note 73 The note that begins the book
Following the publication of In the Wake, many people asked me about the process of writing an academic book that speaks to and beyond the academy. More specifically, people wanted to know about the form, and also about the first chapter, “The Wake,” which begins in the register of the autobiographical with my recounting the deaths, in close succession, of three members of my immediate family between May 2013 and February 2014. It was an ethical decision to include them because while I was reading and writing and thinking about Black people being murdered and about what we make in the face of all that structural violence, I was in the midst of so much personal loss. I thought that this loss also needed to be on the page explicity, not just implicitly in the ways that, whether one admits it or not, one is oriented to one’s work from the location of the body and all that that may mean.
It is the note that begins that book.