Christina Sharpe’s latest work, Ordinary Notes, is a dazzlingly inventive, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life. It follows a body of work from the writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities which is groundbreaking and esteemed. Of this recent collection she writes, “I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” She speaks about such silence, the ways to overcome it, and more, with David Chariandy in a bold, rigorous, and deeply important discussion.

Presented in partnership with Hogan’s Alley Society.

Event Participants:

David Chariandy

DAVID CHARIANDY is a writer and professor of literature at Simon Fraser University.  He is the author of the novels Soucouyant and Brother. David’s books have won the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the City of Toronto Book Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, and more.

Christina Sharpe

CHRISTINA SHARPE is a writer, professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University. She is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being which was named a best book of 2016 by the Guardian and The Walrus.