Christina Sharpe: we are held, and held: writing and reading workshop

CCA and Glasgow Women’s Library are delighted to host a writing and reading workshop with Christina Sharpe, the celebrated author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. The workshop will focus on a collective reading of The Hold, the third chapter of this important text, and will provide a close reading and discussion with reference to the poetry of Dionne Brand, other writers and artworks on ‘being in the hold’.

This free, ticketed workshop will take place at the CCA – please book your place via the CCA website.

About: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake” – the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness – Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation. Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of “the wake,” “the ship,” “the hold,” and “the weather,” Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and “wake work” as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

Important themes discussed in the book include care and wake work, blackness and being, The Weather as anti blackness, Trans experience and the , the anagrammatic. All are welcome with no prior formal writing experience required. Capacity is limited, please book in advance.

Booking

This event is a free, ticketed event. Please visit the CCA website to book your place.

Supported by CCA and Glasgow Women’s Library.