Christina Sharpe

Christina Elizabeth Sharpe (born 1965) is an American academic who is a professor of English literature and Black studies at York University in Toronto. Christina Sharpe is Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University, and in 2024 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Early life and education Sharpe was born in Pennsylvania. Raised Catholic, Sharpe attended various parochial, private, and public schools as a child.

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. She completed a master's degree and a doctorate at Cornell University; her dissertation was on African writer Bessie Head.

Her research has also extended into Black visual studies through the critical analysis of Blackness in visual media. Her work makes a point that such visual representations can either further or resist colonial and racial narratives, looking at how Black artists engage with and sometimes fight against these narratives.

Books

She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, and Ordinary Notes.

Sharpe is best known for the influential concept of "wake work" that she details in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, which was published in 2016. In the book, she probes into the legacies of the Atlantic slave trade on the lives of Black people and how that manifests in their contemporary social, cultural, and political lives. "Wake work" calls for insurgent engagement with the ways that Black life and death are figured by anti-Blackness, into practices of survival, remembrance, and resistance in African culture. In the Wake garnered acclaim for its blend of personal narrative with a combination of historical and theoretical analysis. It was named a best book of 2016 by The Guardian and The Walrus.

Her previous book was Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects, published in 2010. The book explores ways in which narration, relation, and representation come together to create Black subjects and identities in a post-chattel slavery era. Throughout the book, Sharpe investigates how the legacies of chattel slavery, colonialism, and racial violence continue to be present in Black communities and uses critical race theory, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to analyze these times.

Ordinary Notes (2023) gathered a range of responses. Kirkus Reviews described it as "an exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness," highlighting Sharpe's integration of diverse forms and topics. Similarly, The New York Times noted how Sharpe's collection of notes serves as a radical reading of Black life, presenting an alternative to popular misconceptions. However, some critics have pointed out challenges related to the book's fragmented format. The Chicago Review of Books mentioned that while the versatile form supports the ambitious range of subjects, the kaleidoscopic structure might make it difficult for readers looking for a traditional narrative arc. Ordinary Notes was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and NPR.

Teaching and research Sharpe was employed at Hobart and William Smith Colleges from 1996 to 1998. Awarded tenure in 2005, Sharpe became a full professor in 2017.

Awards