"Black Studies: in the Wake" The Black Scholar, Special Issue, The Boundaries of Black Studies

Sharpe details the intellectual work of a continued reckoning the longue duree of Atlantic chattel slavery with black fungibility, antiblackness, and the gratuitous violence that structures black being, of accounting for the narrative, historical, structural, and other positions black people are forced to occupy. Living in the wake as people of African descent means living what Saidiya Hartman identifies as the both the "time of slavery" and the "afterlife of slavery" in which "black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.

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