Summary: The ninth episode is the result of a conversation with Christina Sharpe, scholar of English literature and Black Studies. Author of the books Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010) and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), she is currently a professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. Christina Sharpe's voice appeared earlier in several episodes of the “Corona Under the Ocean” podcast series over the course of 2020. Astrida Neimanis, Filipa Ramos or Elizabeth Povinelli would mention her work in the different conversations we had from the ocean and towards the waters. In the Wake is a book that I started to read in other people's voices but that does not let itself be translated into other people's words. It has its own different grammar that reveals and recounts grammar as a form of power. It’s an essay written in first person that tells the history and present of the black diaspora, the structural and constitutive anti-blackness of white colonialism and capitalism. During our conversation, Christina emphasized that the use of the first person and her own biography when writing In the Wake is not intended to speak of her individual experience as exceptional, but rather as an exercise in openness towards the historical and structural dimension of the book. Black suffering, also black resistance, must be contextualized in the long history of structural anti-blackness. Christina also tells how some people have seen in In the Wake a book about Black Death when it is also a book about Black Life, about forms of collective resistance within a constantly hostile climate. "I am interested in the ways we live in and despite that terror," she says. Being “in the wake” also implies the existence and possibility of "wake work". This conversation with Christina Sharpe took place at the end of December 2020. Christina was in Toronto and I was in Berlin. We began by talking about the sea and water and how her thinking is a thinking with water and with authors who think with water. It is also a form of tidal thinking, where Christina's voice carries many other voices and works in an explicit and non-linear way. Although speaking and writing can produce very different languages from each other, Christina Sharpe's way of speaking contains her writing and vice versa. In this conversation, not only do other voices appear within her own, but the writing itself becomes voice thanks to the organic becoming of talking into reading aloud. When writing is inscribed in bodies, they remind us that thinking is also visceral and material.
