![]() ![]() They are a vehicle for the preservation and transmission of “beauty’s knowledge.” I am reminded of the image that concludes Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay “Evidence”: Zora Neale Hurston passing into her reader’s care an emptied “brown bag of miscellany” and “the jumble it held.” “You take this, emptied out, strewn and scattered,” Edwards writes. Sharpe’s notes are less invested in mounting a singular, unified argument than in offering lessons in attentiveness. Archival photographs, contemporary artworks, public memorials, and news clippings intermingle with stories of Sharpe’s childhood and family, creating new arrangements for thinking about black living and dying. “It is a project, not a place.” Across the smooth surface of the master narratives to which they are keyed, black notes disturb and disarrange.įor writer and professor Christina Sharpe, these eruptive operations tell us what it is to live “life under these brutal regimes.” Her new book, Ordinary Notes, is structured as a series of 248 numbered reflections of varying lengths, collected for the reader like a handful of gems-or, as Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha describes dandelions, “jewels for everyday” and “ordinary allurements.” Sharpe gathers many threads across these notes, moving freely among subjects and methods. In Édouard Glissant’s 1989 Caribbean Discourse, a single footnote upends the entire formation of the West: “The West is not in the West,” it declares from the subterranean depths of the page. Epigraphs become musical notation glossaries invoke spirits appendices map other worlds. These paratexts echo black inhabitations of space: they refuse to be subordinated. Du Bois to John Keene, is full of rebellious paratexts rearing up from the margins and backs of books-epigraphs, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, and appendices that subvert, interject, and critique. ![]()
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