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Black Studies: in the Wake Author(S): Christina Sharpe Source: the Black Scholar, Vol Black Studies: In the Wake Author(s): Christina Sharpe Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer 2014), pp. 59-69 Published by: Paradigm Publishers Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5816/blackscholar.44.2.0059 . Accessed: 03/10/2014 21:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Paradigm Publishers is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Black Scholar. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Black Studies the many ways that that work is being done. Black studies in the wake is a renewed call In the Wake for black studies to be at the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue CHRISTINA SHARPE durée of Atlantic chattel slavery, with black fungibility, antiblackness, and the gratu- itous violence that structures black being, How can we marry our thought so that of accounting for the narrative, historical, we can now pose the questions whose an- structural, and other positions black people swers can resolve the plight of the Jobless are forced to occupy.5 Black Studies: In the archipelagoes, the N.H.I. categories, and Wake is both the project that I am currently the environment? working on and a call for, and recognition —Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved”1 of, black studies’ continued imagining of You see, it’s not just an intellectual strug- the unimaginable: its continued theoriz- 6 gle. You could call it a psycho-intellectual ing from the “position of the unthought.” struggle. Then you could understand why To frame this call for a black studies in the in the ’60s it wasn’t just a call for Black wake as a problem for black studies, I take Studies; it was a call for Black Aesthetics, it up M. NourbeSe Philip’s call in Zong! 15 was a call for Black Art(s), it was a call for “to defend the dead.” How do we who are Black Power. It was an understanding that, doing work in black studies tend to, care as Lewis Gordon has been the first to keep insisting, we live in an anti-Black world—a systemically anti-Black world; and, there- Christina Sharpe is associate professor in fore, whites are not [simply] “racists.” They the Department of English and Programs in too live in the same world in which we live. Africana, American, and women, gender, The truth that structures their minds, their and sexuality studies at Tufts University. “consciousness,” structures ours. SO THE Her book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making GREAT BATTLE NOW IS GOING TO BE Post-Slavery Subjects, was published in AGAINST “THE TRUTH.” 2010 by Duke University Press. Her cur- —Sylvia Wynter, Proud/Flesh2 rent book project is titled In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. She has recently Defend the dead. published in American Literary History, the —M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!3 premiere issue of Lateral (the online jour- nal of the Cultural Studies Association), on 4 To call this essay Black Studies: In the Wake the Sound Studies Sounding Out! and the is not to announce that black studies is dead Social Text Blog, and has reviews, articles, or to call for its memorialization. Black and/or chapters forthcoming in The New Studies: In the Wake is, among other things, Inquiry, Black Studies Papers, and in Ethi- a staking out of the need for the rereading, cal Confrontations with Anti-Blackness: Af- reinvigoration, and reengagement with the ricana Studies in the 21st Century. work of black studies and a recognition of Christina Sharpe Black Studies 59 This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions for, comfort, and defend the dead, the dy- lives are still imperiled and devalued by a ing, and those living lives consigned, in racial calculus and a political arithmetic aftermath of legal chattel slavery, to death that were entrenched centuries ago. This is that is always-imminent and immanent?7 the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, How might theorizing black studies in the limited access to health and education, pre- wake—and black being in the wake—as mature death, incarceration, and impov- conscious modes of inhabitation of that erishment.”10 A black studies in the wake imminence and immanence (revealed ev- would inhabit this knowledge as the ground ery day in multiple quotidian ways) ground from which we theorize; would work from our work as we map relations between the the positions of knowledge and belief of the past and present, map the ways that the past existence of what Wynter terms “rules which haunts the present? The existence of black govern the ways in which humans can and studies as an object of study does not ame- do know the social reality of which they are liorate the quotidian experiences of terror always already socialized subjects” (Wynter in black lives lived in an anti-black world.8 1994, 68). To do that, I argue that we must be about the work of what I am calling “wake work.” Wakes are processes; through them we think “No Humans Involved” about the dead and about our relations to them; they are rituals through which to en- We must now undo their narratively con- act grief and memory. Wakes allow those demned status. among the living to mourn the passing of —Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved” the dead through ritual; they are the watch- ing of relatives and friends beside the body In 1992, in the wake of a Simi Valley jury of the deceased from death to burial and the that had no black jurors on it, retuning a accompanying drinking, feasting, and other not guilty verdict for the four white officers observances; a watching practiced as a reli- on trial for the beating of Rodney King, Syl- gious observance. But wakes are also “the via Wynter wrote an open letter to her col- track left on the water’s surface by a ship; the leagues at Stanford University. Published in disturbance caused by a body swimming, or abbreviated form in 1992 and in its entirety one that is moved, in water; the air currents in 1994, “No Humans Involved: An Open behind a body in flight; a region of disturbed Letter to My Colleagues”11 again centers flow; in the line of sight of (an observed ob- Wynter’s unflinching unmasking of “clas- ject); and (something) in the line of recoil sificatory schemas,” the ordering of Euro- of (a gun)”;9 finally, wake also means being Western knowledge, and the “present con- awake and, most importantly, conscious- ception of the human being” as “Man.”12 ness. Living in the wake as people of African “No Humans Involved” issues a renewed descent means living what Saidiya Hartman call that is redoubled by its publication identifies as the both the “time of slavery” alongside her “A Black Studies Manifesto,” and the “afterlife of slavery,” in which “black that the work of black studies requires a full 60 THEBLACKSCHOLAR TBS • Volume 44 • Number 2 • Summer 2014 This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:10:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions recognition that we live in a “systemically Humans Involved” and “A Black Studies anti-Black world . and, therefore, whites Manifesto”? In the anti-black “post-racial” are not [simply] ‘racists.’ They too live in the social reality animated and subtended by a same world in which we live. The truth that black US president, non-humans weaponize structures their minds, their ‘consciousness,’ sidewalks; shoot ourselves while handcuffed structures ours” (Wynter 2006, 7). in the back of police cars; are brutally mur- “Where,” writes Wynter in “No Humans dered while asking for help; incarcerated, Involved,” “did this classification system assaulted, and stopped and frisked for walk- come from?” that produces an acronym ing, driving, and breathing while black.14 N. H. I.,13 one that comes to be “used rou- What will be the work of black studies now tinely” by the Los Angeles Police Depart- to defend those who are subject to such ment and by “public officials of the judicial overwhelming and gratuitous, narrative and system of Los Angeles” to malign young actual, discursive and material death? To do black men, in particular those young, black what I am calling wake work would neces- men [and women] who read as jobless or sitate a turn away from juridical, philosophi- lower class within dominant epistemolo- cal, historical, or other disciplinary solutions gies, with the indicator of non-humanity? to blackness’s ongoing abjection toward a (Wynter 1994, 42). “Why,” she continues, black studies through and in the wake that “should the classifying acronym N. H. I., would activate those multiple meanings of with its reflex anti-Black male behaviour- wake and inhabit them, live them, as black- prescriptions, have been so actively held ened consciousness.15 and deployed by the judicial officers of Los In theorizing the black everyday in the Angeles, and therefore by ‘the brightest and wake of the slave ship and the hold, we the best’ graduates of both the professional would recognize their continued existence; and nonprofessional schools of the univer- recognize “the ways that we are constituted sity system of the United States? By those through and by vulnerability to overwhelm- whom we ourselves would have educated?” ing force though not only known to our- (Wynter 1994, 43).
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