# Ordinary Notes - Hardcover

by **Christina Sharpe** (Author)

Critically acclaimed author of _In the Wake_, "Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements . . . and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility" (Saidiya Hartman).

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.

**4-color art throughout**

### Author Biography

**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--and _Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects_. She is currently the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, in Toronto, Canada, where she lives.

**Number of Pages:** 392

**Dimensions:** 1.17 x 9.08 x 6.59 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** April 25, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 35.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 35.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Ordinary Notes - Hardcover

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